Vine finally arrives on Windows Phone 8, competes with powerful 6sec

After a long wait Vine is now available on Windows Phone 8, officially bringing its popular six-second videos outside of Android and iOS. The app arrives in Store with a respectable feature set, including free and unlimited clip uploads and social network integration with Facebook and Twitter.

Vine takes advantage of built-in Windows Phone features, such as live tiles and camera lenses, as the app allows users to pin the Vine camera and their favorite accounts and channels on the homescreen and trigger the Vine recording mode from the built-in camera app (or third-party camera apps that support lenses, like Nokia Camera).

Like its Android and iOS counterparts, Vine lets users search for other folks who use the service, using the Windows Phone People Hub, Twitter following list and manually. Vine users can invite others to join via email and messages. Categories, editor's picks, featured hashtags and trending posts can be viewed in the app, as well as interactions (likes, new followers, etc).

So after reading the headline of this story you may be wondering what sort of features 6sec has up its sleeve that Vine cannot offer at the moment. Well, the feature that I appreciate the most in 6sec, that is not available in Vine, is the option to turn off automatic video playback in the stream. This makes the navigation less intrusive and, for me, more pleasant. Luckily, the sound can be muted in Vine, but it is still not ideal.

The camera in 6sec is also more pleasant to operate as the buttons come with a description underneath (set focus and show grid, for instance) and flash can be toggled on and off. By contrast, the corresponding Vine interface only has icons which, based on my experience, are not as well thought-out or as intuitive as the ones from 6sec.

There are other features in 6sec that Vine does not have, including support for multiple user accounts, options for protecting posts and marking them as sensitive and more themes.

Now that Vine is finally available on Windows Phone 8, users who have yet to get 6sec will likely choose the official client. However, right now it does not offer the best Vine experience.

Vine is available to download from Windows Phone Store.