Windows Phone App Review: Moquu

Moquu is a cool photography app for your Windows Phone. Moquu allows you to capture a series of photographs and create an animated gif file from them.  Animated gifs can be shared through Facebook, Twitter, and email.  Images captured to build the gif can be taken manually, in bursts or in timelapse mode.

It takes a little time to get used to Moquu's layout and you can't store the finished product on your Windows Phone (stored on Moquu's server).  While it has room for improvement, Moquu gives your Windows Phone camera a rather nice creative tool.

The main pages for Moquu has a:

• Create Page where you build your gif images
• Recent page displaying gif creations from other users
• Albums page displaying your gifs creations and an Inspire Me album filled with gif creations from other users
• Mode page where you can tweek the camera shutter settings.

Camera settings from the Mode page allow you to choose between single shot, timelapse, and burst mode. There is also settings to set a delay and timer durations for each mode.

The Create page is where you'll spend most of your time and is laid out fairly simply. Up top are controls to import pictures from your Pictures Hub, access the settings and access the help screen. Controls on the viewfinder include a grid on/off toggle, an onion skin toggle where you can see an impression of the previous picture, a reset button, a undo button, your shutter button, and processing button (when you're done shooting and want to build your .gif file).

Once created, you can edit the images by moving them about in the sequence, delete them all together and adjust the speed of the animation. Created gifs can be shared via Twitter, Facebook or email. Tumblr support is in the works.

So far everything sounds fairly simple. It's once you get your .gif file created things get a little confusing. You need to create a Moquu account to save and share your creations (free) and .gif files are saved to Moquu's website. When sharing gif files, you send links to your Moquu gif instead of the actual file. The files are not saved on your Windows Phone in the Pictures Hub, which would have been nice.

The end product with Moquu is decent and does expand your Windows Phone camera's creative tools. But I'm not sure everyone will like uploading their gif files to Moquu's site. I would have preferred to see this as an option with your images stored on your Windows Phone or maybe even an alternative to store them on your SkyDrive account. It's my understanding that the developer is looking into a long tap option to save the gif to your Pictures Hub which would do the trick as well.  All in all, I think Moquu has potential but the lack of storing files locally may hold this app back.

Moquu is a free app for your Windows Phone and you can grab it here at the Windows Phone Marketplace.