With phone cameras becoming more and more popular and with the looming holiday season, more people than ever will be taking photos with that little device they carry everywhere.

In this article we thought we would explore some of the great options for taking photos with your Android and iPhone cameras that will allow you to do more than just store them on your phone in their same ole' boring picture format.

Photo Illusion - App Brain, allows you to add filters and effects on HD images right on your phone. Make B&W multi-image composites and color chnages as well as cropping and rotating photos without loosing quality. Take your photo, crop, rotate, save, add effects. The app is limited to these effects on the free version. There is a paid version with more options.

The next app that we like is TeleportMe 360, this app allows you to do panoramic images from your camera phone. Very cool. There is a new upgrade to this app that allows you to take a photograph in portrait mode rather than in only landscape mode as before.

Simply launch your camera and tap the screen, then pan in a clockwise motion, the program will allow you to  save your image to your Facebook page and show you on your phone prior to posting what the image will look like. If you have a love for pano images this is a great app.

Another great app is Adobe Photoshop Express. This little app will allow you to store images on a free Adobe photoshop.com free account and requires an SD card in your camera phone. It will access your images and allow you to store them offsite in the event your phone is stolen or like me if you change it and have lost pix in the past because the card types of storage were not compatible. etc. Crop zoom, edit your photos with borders and filters for great efffects with  Adobe Photoshop Express.

This next app we like and trust me, this list could go on forever is Pic Say. Like most apps there is a free version that is limited and a paid version the Pro, that allows for a lot more functions. Spring for the pro version if you like to have fun with scrap booking or making and having fun with pics of your friends.

The final app we like is Lifepics. This app will allow you to setup and use a Lifepics account anywhere to upload your digital camera photos and have them printed at a Lifepics partner lab anywhere near you. There are literally 1000's of labs across the US and Canada that participate with Lifepics, and one of the coolest parts about this is, no matter where you are, you can take a photo, upload it to your lifepics account, find a lab using the zip code or GPS on your phone that is near by and have a print of the image in an hour. (One hour lab necessary of course.)

Think of the possiblities. You could snap a pic of your kids at Christmas, email the photo to Grandma, and send it to a lab near her using the zip code option and she would simply go in and pick it up. Very cool.

This holiday season don't just take pictures, make some fun and then send 'em to the people that really want to see them or better yet print them out at a lab near them. What a cool world we live in.