Impressions: Fun Booth

The iPhone and iPod Touch are platforms that you can always expect to see plenty of fun little apps that you probably wouldn’t see anywhere else, except for maybe Nintendo’s DSi, but that’s another story. One of these particular apps is Fun Booth, the expanded webcam software sequel from Spoonjuice for the iPhone/iPod Touch. It’s not actually a game, but of course with the right images and the right sense of humor, you can have quite a bit of fun with it. 

Fun Booth is a miniature photo editor that can be used with your iPhone to take images and edit them, or to edit existing images with your iPod Touch. Don’t confuse this kind of editing with the kind of Photoshopping teens do on MySpace – this is a very garish kind of editing such as adding silly props to your photos in order to have a few laughs.

It’s a fairly straightforward and enjoyable little program that doesn’t require much work or effort on your part. Simply choose or take a photo and play with the four buttons located on the bottom of the screen: send your masterpiece to others, refresh the props used on your particular photo, save your photo, or choose the final button in order to mess around with your options. It’s very easy to figure out, as well as easy to cycle through the several props that come with the application.

You can choose from silly mustaches, rubber clown noses, beards, sunglasses, and a myriad of other funny items with which to decorate photos of you, your friends, your dog, or your Aunt Beatrice. While you can drag the chosen prop to wherever you need to on a photo, with the app’s face detection you don’t always have to. Fairly clear facial shots should register easily so that placement isn’t necessary. Of course, with photos where it isn’t readily apparent where the faces are located, you’ll need to do a bit of messing around to make the funniest picture. You can do this simply by dragging around images on the touch screen. Very simple.

While the app is useful and can make for some quick laughs, I didn’t enjoy the fact that you can’t just go to a list of your props and choose the one that you’d like to use in a photo. You have to cycle through the entire set over and over in order to get what you want, and that can be a little time consuming. Of course, the randomizing button works wonders if you just want to silly up a particular photo without too much muss and fuss.  And while iPod Touch users can take advantage of many of the app’s features, you’ll need an iPhone (with its built-in camera) to really make the most out of the software.

Fun Booth is a pretty neat and entertaining little application for the iPhone/iPod Touch that’s surprisingly big on features and easy to use.  It’s especially useful for people who love to take (and edit) lots of photos, with the option to tweet their adventures to Twitter and other online image-ready services.  iPhone users can take full advantage, using the phone’s native camera and even assigning their creations as contact images.  Affordable in price and big on laughs, Fun Booth is perfect for those of us who love to inject a little humor into everyday situations, and who doesn’t look better with a tacky, cartoonish curled mustache?  That’s right, nobody.

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