Pudding.to

With Instagram still not available on Android, the market is open to competitors to stake their photo-sharing claims. Pudding.to is the latest, promising to be "The most innovative photo sharing app ever". That means filters, yes, but also the ability to upload multiple photos, and richer tags including music and location.

So says the review I found somewhere. (Honestly I took an iPhone shot of it on a computer screen)

I have talked about Pudding before, specifically Pudding Camera - published by successful Korean App developers KT Hitel (part of the KT conglomerate of companies) who have brought you Pudding Camera (2011 iTunes App Store Best Seller, 20 odd thousand downloads on Android), Korean Celeb Face Match (Don't ask!) and the original Korean Foursquare clone "I'm In" amongst others 

KTH love their Phone cameras - as evidenced by the original Pudding Camera, which was translated to English and found great success outside of Korea. with their new App "Pudding.to" they're taking on instagram with the ability to share those photos you've taken and add all the prerequisite filters it seems people are so craving to turn their "crap-snaps" and "sel-cas" into introspective lomo-ised works of art. (Not that I necessarily dislike that....)

KTH took the proactive step of launching pudding.to in both Korean and English simultaneously and have associated Blogs for Pudding Camera, pudding.to and Korean Celeb Face Match at - you guessed it - www.pudding.to (.to being the TLD for The Kingdom of Tonga and "to" being 2, as in their second camera app! Smart aye!)

Below is something of a walk-through of the app and some screenshots for Y'all:

Welcome to Pudding.to!

Like InstaGram, You can see popular photos

Recommendations on Pudding photographers to follow

User Profile

Take a picture

Add a filter, frame and add in a tilt-shift effect

Add a mood Tag

Or choose up to four photos for a collage effect

Be careful not to cut off any heads

Add a comment, Tag with hashtags, what you're listening to or your current location

et voila!

These were taken on the iOS version of the app. I have had some trouble running Pudding.to on Android, specifically on Gingerbread 3.21 and Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0. I have been in touch with the developers at KTH and they note that the issue (not being able to login) is known and has to do with authentication on non-network devices, i.e. you can only use pudding.to on phones and tablets with 3G and LTE connectivity, my original Wifi Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 and Asus EEE Tablet Transformer (neither of which connects to a cell network) are sh*t out of luck - for now. I have been assured that the issue will be fixed in the next update - 1.0.3. I am not sure if this affects non-connected iPad 2s and iPod Touches with Cameras - Kudos to anyone who can test out the app and let me know.

Overall Pudding.to is a pretty good follow up to the original pudding camera. The addition of extra tagging options and ability to view users in your area add to the functionality and beat Instagram. In future updates I would like to see a couple of more filters and of course a fix for non-networked devices. Best of all - It's free!

Score: ★★★★ 4/5