We covered TeliportMe earlier this year, the ambitious Indian startup that aims to combine a crowd-sourced database of street-level images from across the world into a Google Street View-like product, and were fascinated by its 360 Android app for taking panoramic photos.
Yesterday, the company launched a newer, faster website and a new version of the Android app with significantly upgraded photography chops. It includes settings to take a normal quality panorama, like it did before, and adds a new higher quality option.
When set to normal quality, you can just pan the phone around as the camera keeps snapping pictures. It’s fast, but the pictures aren’t as great as with the newer option. With the higher quality setting, you have to stop and let the camera take a decent picture before you move on to the next one, thus resulting in a much sharper panorama overall.
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More importantly, the app now allows shooting of panoramas in portrait mode. A portrait orientation for each shot means that you have to take a higher number of photos to cover the same stretch, but the higher vertical pixel count results in a much larger panorama once you are done shooting.
TeliportMe has doubled its user-base in the past couple of months and claims to be “easily the fastest panorama capturing app on any platform”. Vineet Devaiah, a co-founder of the company, also told us that the 360 app was soon going to become the official panorama app be available on Samsung phones. That should happen in about three months’ time.
If you want to lay your hands on it now, the 360 app is available from the Android Market for free. Go stitch some panoramas!
Update: Updated the story to issue a correction from the developer. TeliportMe will soon be available on Android-powered phones from Samsung but it won’t be an official app. We regret the error.
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