Hello Friends is a really nifty Windows Phone lockscreen app that generates a wallpaper based off your Windows Phone contact photos. While the original release had Hello Friends only compatible with Windows Phone 8 devices, the latest update brings the app to our Windows Phone 7 devices.
Version 3.0 of Hello Friends is now available for the Windows Phone 7 devices and while it won't automatically change your lockscreen wallpaper, it allows you to create the image collage, save it to your Pictures Hub and set it manually as your lockscreen wallpaper as you would any other photo.
At the present, there is only one collage template available for the Windows Phone 7.5 version. You do have the ability to create your collage based on all your contact photos or just a select few. Unfortunately, if you select only a few some photos are replicated to fill the full collage. [Update: Turns out it actually has numerous templates, they're just organized differently from the Windows Phone 8 version. To get to them, head to the filters page straight to the collage. There are four buttons in the app bar, the right and left outer ones let you choose the template.]
Along with Windows Phone 7.5 support, the updated Windows Phone 8 version also adds a few improvements to the app.
- Two new templates (“6×10 Friends” is now the template with the highest number of pictures and “9 Accent Mix” contains a box that is colored with the phone accent color)
- New preview mode
- New template selection window that shows miniatures of all templates
- A new live tile
- More refresh intervals
- Shuffle option when previewing your collage
You also have the customary performance tweaks and bug fixes with the Hello Friends update.
While we would have liked to have seen the templates in the Windows Phone 7.5 version of Hello Friends it's a start. There is a free trial version of Hello Friends available in the Windows Phone Store to let you try things out.
The full version of Hello Friends is currently running $.99 and you can find it here at the Windows Phone Store.
