Windows Phone App Review: Tola

deviantART is a website dedicated to entertain, inspire, and empower the artist in all of us. Tola is a Windows Phone app that taps into all that artistic greatness and delivers it to your Windows Phone.

While not an "official" deviantART app, Tola is a nice app to surf around the photography and paintings that deviantART has to offer. You can browse through the various categories of art or take a gander at the daily Deviations which is a random collection of pieces from deviantART.

Tola is laid out fairly simple with pages for the various categories, the top viewed images on deviantART, and the Daily Deviation page which lists about three dozen images.

To the bottom of the main pages you'll find a search button and a navigate button. You can search by subject keyword or artists, such as one of  my favorites Dalantech.  The navigate button is basically a forward button to balance things out with your Windows Phone back button.

The categories page on Tola lists all the categories of imagery on deviantART and you simply tap on the category to drill down to more specific areas of that category. To move back up the category listings, you'll use your Windows Phone back button.

Each category or sub-category will pull up a thumbnail view of images sorted by the top images and new images. Once you find an image you'd like to see more of, just tap the thumbnail and a larger thumbnail will appear with more information on the image (title, artist, category, etc.). At the bottom of the image's page you'll find a button to view the image and from the three-dot menu the option to view the image at deviantART's website. When you tap the view button, you'll have the option to save the image to your phone or share the image via email or SMS messaging.

All in all, I like Tola. It's a nice image viewer for deviantART fans. I do wish the navigation was a little smoother with maybe a home button to return to the main listing of categories. That would eliminate all the back button presses.

It would also be nice to log into your deviantART account but being an un-official app, that might not be possible.

If you are a deviantART fan or just looking for an app that taps into a healthy library of photographs and art, Tola is worth a try. Tola is a free, ad supported app that you can find here at the Windows Phone Store.