The picplz service will shut down permanently as of 3 July 2012. The publisher apologizes for any inconvenience this will cause.

picplz is an Android app that lets you create and share beautiful images. Fun and easy to use, it's a great free app to have on your phone wherever you go.

Using your phone's camera, picplz takes a photo and then lets you apply one of nine filters to it. You can then upload your picture and share it on multiple online services including Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Posterous, foursquare and Flickr. Your pictures are saved to your picplz profile online (you need to create an account when you first sign up).

The picplz site itself is a sort of location-aware social photo sharing network. It links photos together by location and automatically adds friends from linked social services (Twitter, Facebook, etc) to your friends list. You can easily view images taken close to your location, recently, or by friends.

picplz's built-in image filters are simple but work well (our favorites are 'Cross Process' 'Russian Toy Camera' and 'The 70s' - just as good as Instagram on the iPhone, we reckon). The app is super fast at applying filters and uploads quickly in the background too.

A couple of things we were a little disappointed by were the lack of options within filters, and picplz's inability to import photos already on your phone's SD card. A 'save for later' feature would be great for moments when you just don't have time to add a caption or a filter to your shots.

Until Instagram is available for Android, we think picplz is about as good a social camera app as you'll find. In fact, we reckon we'll still be using picplz when Instagram drops. It's that good.