Editor’s Note: Today’s review comes to us from guest blogger Micky Aldridge, who is the the Editor-in-Chief of Nokiausers.net. Last week, Micky sent me a note to let me know he had spotted this new app in Ovi Store called “Molome” and asked if he could review it for us. He was excited about the app – and the buzz it had been generating online – and so of course, we said YES. As you will see, Molome offers some great new options for photo-sharing fans including cool “filters” that can be applied to the look of your photos, and the app is only in its earliest days. Read on to learn more …

Molome is a lovely, Qt-based photo-sharing application that is exclusive to Nokia’s new Symbian and S60 5.0 devices, and comes from someone you may have heard of before, Sittiphol Phanvilai.

That’s right, Sittiphol is pretty well known to us old timers, especially those of us who owned the very popular Nokia N95 back in the day.

Sittiphol, and HLP International Inc, a highly talented group of developers have been working hard behind the scenes on Molome for sometime now, and having only released the app to Ovi Store on 4 April, it has already seen almost 5,000 downloads! Impressive work for a small company, eh?

So what does this application do, I hear you ask? Well, if you are familiar with the iPhone application called Instagram, then this is pretty much what you will find in Molome, but for Symbian. In fact, I would go so far as to say it’s actually going to be much better than Instagram, as I have some great information on what new users of Molome can expect in the near future when the app is updated. More on that, after my review … but first, check out this cool stop-motion video about Molome shot on a Nokia N8:

As mentioned earlier, Molome is a application built with Nokia’s Qt, which not only brings a very smooth experience to this app, its speed, and performance is also impressive.

Once installed on your Nokia smartphone, its very easy to set up. Simply create your free account, then connect Molome to your social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, and then your ready to start shooting photos. Click the “Share” button within the app to take a picture using your phone’s camera – you will have the choice of toggling the flash On/Off, as well as using auto focus or macro settings.

Once you take that perfect shot, you can then start adding a variety of filters to your photos within Molome (including color options, sepia tones, borders, the look of old paper or slide film and more – 16 in all for now), then upload quickly to your Molome online account, which will then also share your photo to your social networks, it’s a simple as that. But, it’s not just about Sharing here, Molome extends your social media networks, and even offers you the chance to be awarded “Badges” for your photo uploads.

Let me show you what Molome looks like. The screenshot below displays your Timeline.

As you can see, you are presented with a variety of photos from all the users you choose to follow.  That’s right, you can follow your friends and family and see what photos they upload to Molome. But not just that, you can comment on those photos, and “Love” them too.

From the Options found along the bottom of the screen within Molome, moving right, the next screen shows you the Most popular photos. These are ranked in popularity from the amount of “Loves” and Comments.

Next up is an Option which is not yet available in this early version, its called “Notifications”.  This option will be added very soon, and will pretty much do as the title says, notify you of any activity related to any of your photos.

Profiles, is the next section, and this by default shows your own profile, indicating the amount of friends, and family following you, but also how many people you follow too. It also shows you how many photos you have uploaded with Molome.

It’s within Profiles where you can search for other users by their usernames, and once Molome has found someone you can then choose to follow them.

You will notice that one of my photos within Molome above is on its side.  As mentioned earlier, there are many improvements coming to Molome, and one of which is Auto-Rotate, this means that when you shoot a photo in Physical Landscape, once it is uploaded Molome will rotate your photo so it is displayed correctly.

Other improvements to come soon are being able to add your own personal Avatar to your profile, new UI improvements, and of course those notifications.

As you can see from the screenshot above, this is Settings which is available via Options.  All there is right now is an option to clear cache, and to toggle the camera shutter sound to On or Off.

New settings to be added here soon will be the option to store photos to Mass Storage, as at the moment they are stored on Phone Memory.

I had the pleasure of chatting with the developer, Sittiphol, this past weekend and he gave me some great insights into Molome, including how the name was chosen. Here’s what Sittiphol had to say:

“MOLOME project was first started by me, Sittiphol, from the demand of myself to apply the world best camera phone, Nokia N8, to take the photo, edit in “Style” in very short time and share it on Twitter/Facebook instantly. However, I still couldn’t find any application that could do the task on Symbian yet. So… I decided to do it myself and MOLOME project has begun from that time on.

Why MOLOME? … The day our team made the discussion about the name, we got so many words but the keys are “Mobile”, “Follow Me” and “Lomo Style”. So at last those words combined to “MOLOME” which had the feeling of fun around.

The logo of MOLOME is the animal that has cool adaptable eyes like an “owl” … The owl is just like a feature on MOLOME which is able to change your normal image into a “Styling” image and also be able to share it to popular social networks like Twitter and Facebook. If the image is cool enough, we will promote it to the front page of molo.me website as well.

For effect filters, there are now 16 filters available in MOLOME, each filter make the total different feeling. It is now your time to choose the best one to make your image cool by “single touch”!”

Molome is available as a free download in Ovi Store.

How do you Molome? Share your ideas in the Comments section below.

About the guest blogger

My name is Micky Aldridge, aka @Mickyfin on Twitter, you may know me from Nokiausers where I’m Editor-in-Chief, and Owner of NokiaDNA.com. You can also follow me on Twitter @nokiausers and @NokiaDNA too.