Gadget Gurus App Review: Pinterest for Android

By now, even if you’ve only ever heard about this fancy thing called “The Internet”, there’s a good chance that you’ve also heard about the social network known as “Pinterest”.  In short, Pinterest is a sort-of scrap-booking/pinboard/digital-locker-for-ideas type of website.  In reality, it’s pretty tough to describe what, exactly, Pinterest is and what you do with it.  Sure enough, though, ask anyone and they’ll tell you they’ve at least used the site. More recently, Pinterest seems to favor the fairer sex with regards to usage statistics, but there are certainly uses for all folks of all shapes and sizes.  As a photographer, it’s a great place for a digital scrapbook for ideas!  But this isn’t a review about Pinterest, the website, but rather the recent Android release of their native app (Play Store Link).

Presentation

It’s obvious from the length of time that it’s taken Pinterest to get this app onto Android that they’ve been doing SOMETHING behind the scenes.  Without a doubt, they’ve been taking the time to make this look and feel like one of the best experiences that a person can have digitally collecting…stuff and sharing it with friends and family.  The app is smooth and fluid, pictures look great, and the way that posts are arranged gives it a really great presentation that’s easy on the eyes and extremely easy to lose a lot of time to while browsing for hours upon hours (just ask my wife).  The app works in both landscape and portrait mode, and (presumably) would look absolutely fantastic on any number of Android’s tablet devices.

Usability

The Pinterest app makes the actual act of “pinning” things very easy.  As with nearly every app on Android, the Pinterest app is baked into the “share” functionality of just about everything.  Find a neat website that you want to share out with friends?  The Pinterest app makes it really easy to do so.  Along with sharing pins, the app makes viewing other folks’ pins fairly easy as well.  My only “con” with this app would be the fact that viewing your friends list has no real way to find who you’re looking for in the app.  Instead, users are forced to scroll through an arbitrarily-sorted list of all of the people they follow. Personally, I find the lack of that feature a disappointment.  I frequently want to search for specific users, and can’t seem to find a way to do that.  One feature that I do find really useful (especially as a content creator) is the protection offered to pins that aren’t properly shared.  This seems to be the biggest complaint about Pinterest; that being that it often-times does not give credit back to the creator.  The app seems to offer a bit of protection.

Conclusion

After an extremely long wait (at least in terms of apps) receiving the Pinterest app for Android has been well worth it.  The app works well, makes it easy to browse and share content and does everything you’d want in an Android app.  At a cost of free, there’s absolutely no reason any Pinterest user shouldn’t have this on their Android phone.  Go ahead and pick this one up, and start pinning!