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Hipstamatic updated for iOS 4

Everybody’s favourite retro camera app, Hipstamatic, has finally had its iOS 4 updates approved by Apple and the update is now available for through iTunes.

Hipstamatic v.160 sees some handy new features making an appearance, the most immediately obvious of which is called Stacks. You can bundle your prints into image groups and then batch upload them to Facebook, Flickr or email – mega handy.

Or, it would be if it worked properly; Facebook is a bit temperamental – the connection kept failing and out of our stack of five, just one photo made it onto Facebook. We tried several times with no joy; the handset started getting really hot and it was obviously working pretty hard. The good news is that Flickr and email were both much faster and painless; and let’s face it, Hipstamatic prides itself on wonderful retro photos, not Facebook integration. You can always save your photos to the phone’s gallery and upload them via the Facebook app instead.

Part of the fun of Hipstamatic is experimenting with the different lens and film options available, so you can tag your photos with this information for later replication too. The flash option, which was previously a tenuous brightening of the screen to provide a bit more light, now uses the iPhone 4’s built-in flash. It does retain that wonderful warming-up sound though.

Our favourite thing about this update, though, is the app’s newfound speed. It’s faster – much faster. Having readied ourselves for the traditional wait when opening the app, we were surprised to be up and shooting in no time. Both start-up and print readying are nice and smooth, as are in-app movements, like switching from the back- to the front-view of the camera. The new version is also meant to be more battery-efficient, although we haven’t had it long enough to confirm or deny that.

The only thing missing is the use of the front-facing camera; we won’t grumble too much about that though, as the same company released Incredibooth for your retro-front-facing needs.

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