Windows Phone finally gets Instagram, but still branded as uncool

Jacky Yap

October 24, 2013

Mobile users on the Windows Phone can now rejoice: the world most popular photo sharing app Instagram is now coming to Nokia.

The photo-sharing app, which was acquired by Facebook, has over 150 million monthly active users. It has been on iOS for more than three years, and on Android since April 2012. Now it’s coming to Windows Phone within “weeks”, according to Nokia.

The news was also confirmed by Windows Phone’s foremost OEM at its own conference, Nokia World, which took place at Abu Dhabi earlier this week.

Instagram is coming to Lumia in the coming weeks!!! #nokiaworld http://t.co/Nyhdrj5rfg

— Nokia (@nokia) October 22, 2013

While Instagram is 3 years late to Windows Phone, it is definitely better late than never. This is especially the case when American information technology research and advisory firm Gartner recently released a report branding Windows Phone as “uncool”. Here’s the snippet from the report:

“Windows Phone challenges in the smartphone market remain the same, with the need to bring on board more developers and enrich the ecosystem, as well as turning the Windows Phone brand into a cool smartphone brand. While there are clear benefits to the acquisition [of Nokia], such as channel strength, carrier relationship and emerging-market knowledge, the brand and ecosystem do not directly benefit from it.”

Nokia’s devices division is of course also in the process of being acquired by Microsoft.

Earlier last month too, technology consultants Pfeiffer Consulting also released another report on smartphone user experience. The report states that Windows Phone scored the lowest in terms of user experience, falling way behind other operating systems such as iOS, Android or BlackBerry.

With Instagram now available on Windows Phone, maybe now they are slightly “cooler”, although we doubt it would affect much: Prior to this, users can use 6tag for Windows Phone, that includes the majority of the Instagram features found on the official iOS and Android versions.

6tag provides access to the original filters found in Instagram, video uploads, and the linear and radial blur effects. There are also added support for sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, VK, and Foursquare.