Car apps : Ulysse Speedometer

There are several free apps for smartphones available. Ulysse Speedometer was one of them I liked a lot. Here is a small review.

The basic approach of the application is to warn you, both on display and with sound, when you reach a certain speed, which you can define. Although it is a nice feature to have, I can watch the speed by myself, so it has no advantage for me. But there are other useful features which I appreciated and used.


Firstly, it has a really nicely designed user interface, everything what you could be interested in is on one screen - speeds, driven distances and time. And compass plus elevation. It counts daily, weekly and monthly statistics of time and distances, which are available on a "click" or "slide" in the user interface, as if the author wanted to minimes the need for hitting the Menu button.

The compass works perfect with altitude information as a bonus. The UI is nicely designed, you can use it in portrait  and landscape mode but you have to allow the automatic switch in the menu.



The speed accuracy is simillar to other applications such as The Saab Phoenix Application so I assume, it depends on the GPS accuracy and conditions than on the application itself.

 

The HUD (heads-up display) mode works fine incl. settings of colours, saturation and brightness of the numbers. The application shows the speedwarnings in the HUD as well. The appearance of the HUD on the windscreen depends very on it's angle to the car dashboard. For my Saab 9-3 it was fine. I got the HUD numbers in around 1/3rd from the bottom of the windshield but to keep the sight in front of me clean, I had to place the phone close to the middle of the dashboard.

Since GPS is battery hungry, you have to have also a power cable long enough to reach the phone and does not hinder you anyhow. 

This is one of the nicest apps I had in the car. In order to get full statistics, you dont forget to switch the application on. I am using it on HTC Desire and Android 2.2. You can download Ulysse Speedometer for example from the Android Market or Appbrain for free. It does have ads in it. For me it's no problem.