www.ColoradoClassicBroncos.com

Thought I would start a thread covering some of the handy iPhone apps I have found and use on a regular basis, as it applies to my Bronco/other vehicles.

The first is Road Trip Lite. Road Trip allows you to track fuel consumption over time. It's pretty simple and straight forward to use. On each fill up, I enter the mileage, gallons pumped, and price per gallon. When entered, I get back gas mileage for that fill up and an average gas mileage. It's helped me to figure out I average 18.15 MPG ($0.152 per mile) in the Tacoma since 15 May, 2010. My all time best mileage was between 19-28 June 2010 when I pulled in a whopping 22.52 MPG. The crazy thing is, this was the time period where I picked up and towed home the '69 from Denver. Of course, I was averaging 50 MPH on the trip home.

The next is the Auto Zone app. Pretty self explanatory app here. Allows you to store vehicle descriptions making parts research faster, has a shopping cart that computes tax, based on your preferred store, and will provide you will a list of stores nearby.

Next, from "Free the Apps", is Convert Units. This app converts EVERYTHING. Angle, Area, Data, Energy, Force, Length, Mass, Power, Pressure, Speed, Temperature, Time, Volume and even custom conversion settings. It has it all covered. Wanna know how far it is from Denver to Castle Rock? In Angstroms? It can covert it. I don't even know what the hell an Angstrom is!

Finally, is GPS Lite from FreePower. This app uses your GPS engine in the iPhone to pretty much turn it in to a Garmin eTrex, or equivalent. I don't have much experience with this app, but from everyone I have talked to who uses it, it is pretty damn spot on.

I might have misspoken on the GPS Lite app. I was just fiddling with it in airplane mode and it didn't want to pick up a signal. Probably has something to do with the lack of any signals leaving the phone while on a plane. I know of a few zero coverage areas I can experiment with it in.

I use Navigon as my GPS app. The Western US version only cost $29 and doesn't take up all my storage space. Something like 1.5Gigs rather than 4 gigs. Navigon gives true turn by turn audible directions with many of the features of a full blown GPS.

Be aware that Apple cut a few corners on their internal GPS. They use the CPU for some of the computations, and they used a cheapy receiver. I see my location hop around by 200+ feet at times, even with clear views of the sky.

The GPS also sucks power like crazy. If I leave a GPS app running in the background, I get only 2 hours of battery life. In fact, between the GPS running and the constant display updates, Navigon will run my iPhone 3GS battery down in 2 hours even if I have it plugged into power.

So I only use Navigon as a backup GPS. It's nice to know it's there if I really need it though.

Vragor wrote:In fact, between the GPS running and the constant display updates, Navigon will run my iPhone 3GS battery down in 2 hours even if I have it plugged into power.

That's why you should ditch the iPhone and get an Android...better battery life & they come integrated with Google maps & navigation.

Classic69Bronco wrote:I have the HTC Hero. Pretty nice phone.

Thats what my wife has & I really like it. She got it when they first came out and the guy at the Sprint store didn't even know how to use it yet.

Droid X, it is a bit larger than my old blackberry and I have not even started to understand how to use most of the ap's but I love the phone. It is the first one that I actually want to learn about. THe blackbery I figured out as I went along, but this I am actually reading the manual and learning about ap's.

It too has google maps and a GPS, and I have a mount/car charger for it, I can talk on speaker phone, text via voice and navigate all at the same time. Much to be learned on this weekends road trip

sbolt19 wrote:

Vragor wrote:In fact, between the GPS running and the constant display updates, Navigon will run my iPhone 3GS battery down in 2 hours even if I have it plugged into power.

That's why you should ditch the iPhone and get an Android...better battery life & they come integrated with Google maps & navigation.

iPhone has google maps and navigation too, but those don't work out of cell range. This was about true GPS apps that have full maps stored right on the phone. I don't know what GPS apps are available for Android, but for Windows mobile phones, they have nothing like a $29.00 full blown GPS app.