Few apps have ever managed to become an essential part of our arsenal as quickly as AutoPanorama for the Nokia Lumia 800 has. Letting you take flawless wrap-around panoramic images with just a few clicks of the camera button on your Nokia Windows Phone, this app is ideal for everyone. And it’s completely free!

Nokia Lumia 800: 8-megapixel camera in detail

Remember the old days of trying to capture panoramic images on a camera or smartphone? The endless process of aligning and focussing your images before taking the photo and then repeating ad nauseam until you were left with a bunch of useless images that barely lined up once you’d printed them.

Well, those days are long gone! And good riddance, as the free AutoPanorama app for Windows Phone makes beautiful and perfect panoramic pictures an easy point-and-click process, doing all the hard work for you and holding your hand as it walks you through the simple three-step procedure.

AutoPanorama is available free as a tiny 1MB download and, once installed on your Nokia Lumia 800, you can start using it straight away, with no photographic knowledge necessary. As soon as you launch this great app, all you need to do is click the 'New' button and then take the leftmost photo of your new panoramic image.

As soon as the first photo has been taken, a transparent panel on the left of the Nokia Lumia 800’s screen shows the right-hand side of the image you just captured, letting you pan your Nokia Lumia 800 across to the right, to line it up with the scenery through the viewfinder and take the next of your photos.

You then just repeat the process until all your photos have been taken and then tap the ‘Stop’ button, for AutoPanorama to stitch your images together for a perfect panorama. The whole process takes a matter of seconds and you can then save your panorama straight to the Windows Phone Camera Roll.

Although you have to be sure to line up the images as closely as possible for the best results, AutoPanorama is intelligent enough to compensate for slight mistakes, piecing the image together to cover the cracks if you find you have wobbled a bit with your alignment when taking your photos.

Once you’ve saved your new panoramic image to the Camera Roll, the Nokia Lumia 800 then lets you easily auto-fix exposure levels, to ensure the image looks its best, before you then upload it straight to Facebook or SkyDrive to share with your friends. And all directly through the main Windows Phone UI.

Since AutoPanorama is free, there’s no reason not to download and try it. Letting you accomplish in a few clicks what could otherwise take hours of careful alignment (and might still result in an awful looking image), this is our new favourite app and one we strongly recommend for all Nokia Lumia 800 owners.

AutoPamorama for the Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone is available now from the Windows Phone Marketplace completely free!

Nokia Lumia 800: How to use the camera from the lock screen

Why not give AutoPamorama a try on your Nokia Lumia 800 and let us know what you think in the Comments below? And if you’ve got any handy smartphone photography tips you’d like to share with us, then we’d love to hear those too.