We all enjoy a bit of 3D now and again, and the 3DPhotoFree app claims it can bring the magic of the extra dimension straight to your Nokia with some clever software trickery. But is it the real deal or just another gimmick? We've been testing this 3D app out on the Nokia X7 to find out. 

Check out our Nokia X7 Review Roundup

A lot of the popularity of 3D at the moment is down to TV makers and the like saturating the market with products and driving the concept as something you simply must have in your life. But there's also a genuine interest there too, and we have to admit we were intrigued by 3DPhotoFree the moment we came across it on the Ovi Store.

It promises to be able to turn any photo you take with your phone's camera into a 3D image – well, that's the gist of it anyway. It's a lot more complicated than that, as you'll shortly see.

Seeing the end result in 3D requires the old-school red and blue 3D glasses, which – you'll not be surprised to hear, considering this is a free app – you have to supply yourself.

But that's all fine and well. Less acceptable, though, is 3DPhotoFree's interface. When we first loaded it up, we initially hesitated as it seemed as if the program had stopped halfway. It's easily the worst interface we've ever come across in a piece of mobile software.

First of all, it only works in landscape orientation (regardless of which way round your photos were taken), and the controls take the form of eight small icons in two rows of four down the right of the screen. You're left to figure out what these actually do for yourself.

The Help file at least manages to shed some light on affairs, but given that it's launched using one of those eight anonymous icons, we're not sure how much of a redeeming point that is.

We finally managed to figure out how to work the program for ourselves. The top-most icons in the two rows are labelled L and R; you need to select these in turn, then tap the Open icon and attach a photo. Repeat the process for the right-hand side and you're starting to get there.

But to get the full 3D effect, of course, you need images taken from a slightly different perspective, which means taking them manually yourself. You're advised to take one shot, then move an inch or two to the right, and take a second shot. 3DPhotoFree can take up the slack by letting you fine tune the finished image in case your two pics are too close together, or too far apart.

But ultimately you can't get away from the fact that the Nokia X7 – or any other Symbian smartphone for that matter, simply isn't a 3D camera. Manually taking two separate images side by side means the subject needs to be perfectly still, and you need to get your angles just right.

It's a nice try, and does loosely achieve what it sets out to do, but the combination of having to take the two images manually, having to supply your own 3D specs and that horrendous user interface makes 3DPhotoFree hard to recommend.

DOWNLOAD: 3DPhotoFree
Size: 0.21MB
Price: Free