This isn’t a review as such, there are so many sites and blogs these days ripping apart iPhone apps down to their finest technical details and workings, the last thing you need is another one of them. If you really want to know the ins and outs of the Hipstamatic app then be my guest and click here. If you want to look at pretty photos and what can be achieved by using this app then stick with me.

A quick oversight of Hipstamatic and you find it’s basically another ‘Toy Camera’ app for the iPhone, adding various effects, filters and backgrounds to give your photos the look and feel of a lo-fi film camera.

I’ve had Hipstamatic since Christmas after the apps store genius recommend it to me. After installing it I took a instant dislike to it, mainly because once you have bought the app you have to hand over more money to buy the additional filters, and that’s not cool in my mind and a very sneaky way for developers to extract more money from us, I would rather them charge more for the app than drop the a-bomb on us when we hand over our money. Other things quickly annoyed me, you couldn’t save high-res files. (Fixed in the latest version) and the slow speed of processing the image. I gave it a few goes but I just couldn’t get the hang of it, so there it lay on the back page of my apps list gathering digital dust.

A few months in to 2010 and I started seeing some of my fellow iPhonegraphers crop up on flickr with rather slick Hipstamatic photos. Seeing what this app was capable of in the right hands, gave me a quick swift kick up the arse to try it out again. The last few weeks I’ve been getting some pretty cool results with it. Will it replace my favourite iPhone app, Camerabag? I very much doubt it, but it will certainly not be on the back page of my apps from now.

*These photos were taken with the standard filters that come with Hipstamatic.