Phox is a Windows Phone photography app that offers an easy way to add creative effects filters and frames to your pictures. The app does have a respectable selection of filters and frames along with the ability to save your edited image at three different sizes.
But the user interface needs a little fine tuning and the ability to stack filters is a little confusing. Still, none of these issues are devistating and Phox has potential. Phox isn't a bad app to have in your Windows Phone photo app library and worth a try.
The lay of the land with Phox is fairly straight forward. When you launch the app you are greeted with a collage of images from your Pictures Hub. You can tap on one of these thumbnails to edit that image or use the control buttons down below to access your Pictures Hub folders, launch the camera app or refresh the screen collage with new images.
Once you've selected an image, the first order of business is to apply a square crop to things. You also have image rotation controls on the Crop Page if you want to spin things around.
Once cropped, you'll head over to the effects page where you can apply one of eleven filters (lomo, cream, sepia, mono, etc.). In the upper right corner of the screen is the shuffle on/off control that is suppose to allow you to combine filters. I didn't really have much luck stacking filters with the noticeable effect being the images got darker.
Along with filters you have button controls at the bottom of the screen to apply vignette effects and frames. Phox has seven frames (white border, Polaroid, wash, etc.) to apply to your photos. Once you've applied the filters, frames and added a vignette to your image it can be saved to your phone, to SkyDrive, shared on Twitter or shared on Facebook. Images can be saved at high, medium and low resolutions.
Now here's the problem with the user interface. Once you've saved your image you are stuck on the save screen. There's not a "home" button to take you back to Phox's main page which means you have to either a) exit and relaunch the app or b) tap the back button several times. Neither is ideal.
Phox has potential in that it has some nice filters that are easy to apply. The two key areas of improvement is with stacking or combining filters and getting back to the main page to edit another photo. If these two areas can be fine tuned Phox will shine a little brighter.
By no means is Phox a bust. It is a fast way to apply filters to your images and as is, Phox isn't a bad photography app to have in your photo app library. The app just needs a little more work to hold it's own against all the alternatives out there.
Phox is a free app for our Windows Phone 8 and 7.x devices that you can find here in the Windows Phone Store.
