uCamera review [iPhone]

As we 30-somethings look back through photo albums, they tend to be woefully incomplete by today's standards. A few shots of a holiday scene, one or two photos from Christmas, and some random pictures just to use up the roll of film so you could get it sent off to the chemists. The result was one or two years, neatly summarised in 24 pictures.

So it's incredible to think that the youth of today ("yoofs"?) have spent much of their lives equipped with the technology to record each and every day. And that's an opportunity most take full advantage of, judging by the epic number of posed photos lined up alongside the documenting of each and every banal teenage thought.

There's a snag, though. In years to come, will they look back and lament the small, grainy, washed out camera phones they used to capture their memories? Even the iPhone, right now, struggles to take a camera-quality photo, so perhaps it's for the benefit of the future that we start using apps like uCamera.

This app is one of many photo improvement and manipulation apps out there, but it does bring all the functions together in a very neat and easy-to-use package. The first significant feature you'll notice about uCamera is that, unlike the majority of its competitors, this app actually takes the photos, as well as cleaning them up and tweaking them.

It gives you a variety of great options for capturing a quick snap, including a "tap anyway" option so you don't have to aim for that tiny on-screen button, a variety of timed snaps that flash the iPhone 4's light to warn you it's coming, and a steady hand option that holds off on snapping a photo until the handset is relatively still.

Once captured, the photos aren't immediately sent to your Camera Roll. At first this might seem like an obstacle, but it's actually very useful. For one thing your Camera Roll isn't filling up with unsuitable pictures that you're only going to delete anyway, and it gives you the opportunity to tweak them before they're exported to the iPhone's storage space.

You can apply a variety of brightness filters to improve or adjust the image, and a noise reduction filter is included in each as a matter of course. These clarified images can then be cropped, have its contrast or white balance refined, or be manipulated through environmental filters to give you the photo you wanted.

Only then is your gallery exported to the Camera Roll, so the improved images are the only ones that begin filling up your storage space. Or, if you prefer, you can send these images off to Facebook or by email. And as uCamera is also happy to capture videos (though no filtering or adjustments are available for moving pictures), it's a great way to export multimedia from your device to wherever you prefer to keep them.

A particularly nice aspect of this feature is that the app is happy to go through the sometimes lengthy uploads while in the background. You can set them off exporting, and then confidently close the app and be sure your photos and videos will still get where they're going.

If uCamera has any faults, it's that it takes a good while to remember just where all these great functions are kept in the user interface. For some unknown reason tick boxes (or, more accurately, icons that look like tick boxes) seem to be the developer's favourite image. Filters and options are hidden away behind these disguised menus, and often you'll have to go into the gallery, launch one set of options, and then close them again to get to the features you actually want.

This problem is lessened as you begin to remember your way around the app, but as neat as the interface is, it can't easily be accused of being particularly intuitive.

Still, for a camera app that both captures and adjusts your photos, it remains one of the App Store's most impressive, and is well worth a look if you're busy cataloguing your whole life for future generations.