Purikura App Review: VPoser

I’ve been meaning to start reviewing smartphone apps for a while so here we go!

Disclaimer: The app itself is free but some of the content is available through in-app purchases. For review purposes the content was paid for by the developer.

VPoser is an app for the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, and is free to download.

First you have the welcome screen.

You have three course options. ‘Cheese!’ is for taking a picture as normal, ‘Happy Angry Sad Joy’ gives you pose guidelines for emotions, and ‘0 to 10’ gives you other pose guidelines. I liked the idea of pose guidelines as it’s more like real purikura.

I tried the ‘Cheese!’ course first. After you choose it you again have three options in the top right corner. You can take a normal selfie, make a gif, or make a collage. Tap the plus to take your picture.

Once you’ve taken your picture you can use frames, stamps, or pens to decorate your shot.

Frames:

Stamps:

You can resize and turn the stamps with the usual two finger gestures.

Pens:

The dropper zooms in when you touch it so you can pick your colour clearly.

There is an undo button in the top right but there is no eraser so if you change your mind about an early decoration you have to go right back there and re-do everything.

The second option in the ‘Cheese!’ course is the gif option. Here you can take up to five shots to make a gif. You can either take the shots live or add them from your folder.

Then you can decorate. Tap each picture to add stamps and pens individually or tap the frame button at the bottom to add a frame to the whole thing. You can also speed up or slow down the gif with the slider bar.

With a frame:

With stamps too:

As you take the pictures and as you decorate them the app stores them in your folder so you can use them as individual pictures too!

The third option in the ‘Cheese!’ section is collage, you can take or add up to twelve pictures to make a collage.

When decorating you can use frames, pens and stamps as usual. You can also rotate and move the pictures by tapping on them.

Unfortunately a lot of the frames seem to be big so it’s hard to get them looking good for the collages.

Twelve picture collage:

Next let’s look at the guide poses. In the ‘Happy Angry Sad Joy’ section it gives you emotion poses to follow. You choose your emotion at the top and the guide pose will appear on the screen for you to try and follow. Now, I really liked the idea of a guide pose but I don’t think the anime style guide works. My face just doesn’t have her proportions, so I couldn’t line up. Maybe the guide pictures with just an oval for your face would be easier? Anyway, I tried!

Again in the Emotion section you can do individual pictures, make gifs and do collages.

The third and final course ‘0 to 10’ has more purikura-like poses to try. Again it was hard to line up a bit and I used my opposite hand because I can’t take selfies with my right hand very well. Again you scroll along the top for the pose you want to try and the guidelines will appear on the screen.

And you can make gifs in this section too! You can use frames and stamps as before if you like.

I feel like I want to learn my name in sign-language and make a gif!

And as it saves the pics you can make collages in this section too.

Everything up to now is what you get with the free version of the app. There are several paid for decoration packs that you can get. Halloween and Christmas cost 200yen each, while Nature, Accessories, Animals and Food are 100 yen each.

To buy tap the shopping cart icon on the main screen and then the pack you want from the top bar.

Then click ‘sale’ to buy.

I took some sample screenshots,  but there are a couple more rows of frames and stamps on each set.

Nature:

Accessories:

Animals:

Food:

Halloween:

Christmas:

And one final gif:

All in all I quite like this app. I do think it needs a skin lightening option, I was lucky it was a very sunny morning!

I think the guide pose is a great idea however perhaps the anime girl on screen wasn’t needed.

As for the decorations, I think there are some cute ones in there but they seem a bit too bright for me. I think more muted colours would look a bit classier. My favourite packs are the food one because those candy frames are adorable and the Halloween pack because Halloween is always good for decorations!

I like the gif and collage features, and I think it’s good that you can make gifs out of already taken/decorated pictures and that you can decorated pictures taken as gifs separately too. Also when you save in the app it automatically saves to your camera roll, and you have the option of sending the pics by email, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Sina Weibo from within the app.