Palm Pre Apps » gps

Intersection

palmpreapps — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 12:33:56 +0000

Apps that do one thing and do it in a polished and useful manner will always remain popular in the smartphone world. Intersection is a GPS-enabled Palm Pre app that automatically discovers your current intersection with a single tap and lets you text it to the right people with another. It’s simple yet surprisingly useful in a variety of scenarios. If you lead an active social life, or are perennially late to events and have to field-off calls demanding “Where are you?” in an annoyed tone, this will be an invaluable app. Making ad-hoc plans becomes significantly easier with this app.

Intersection lets you configure a list of favorites to whom you can broadcast the message with your intersection. The other option is to send it to all your contacts (yikes!). There’s currently no way to group favorites (“Work”, “Social”, etc.), and that may cramp your use of the app a little bit. The accuracy of the intersection discovery seems to be spot-on. You can also use it to send address reminders or notes to yourself. This Palm Pre app is simple, but covers such a frequently encountered scenario that it’s well worth having on your Pre.

Go To Lite

palmpreapps — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:07:27 +0000

Go To Lite is a waypoint marker that lets you “bookmark” specific points in the real world via GPS. This Palm Pre app is most useful to mark your cars position in a large parking lot or parking garage so that you may easily return to it once you’re done shopping. With that in mind, Go To Lite comes with a built-in “My Car” tab that creates a “waypoint” (the app’s name for these real-world “bookmarks”) for you with a minimum of fuss. The app comes with other quirky built-in waypoints, but the magic happens once you start making your own. You can use Go To Lite while doing any outdoor activity. You can even forget about addresses and street corners and simply create a waypoint instead.

The built-in compass offers another layer of simplicity and ease-of-use. The app comes with pretty sophisticated features, including the ability to create a log and mark the time and description of every waypoint. Waypoints can be sorted by name, date, or nearness to your current location. This means you can even use this app as a note-taking app that helps you complete tasks depending on where you are – simply create a new waypoint every time you tell yourself: “I need to do X the next time I’m here.” Go To Lite is a solid new app for the Palm Pre and introduces every smartphone owners secret dream app – an app to help you find your car in a large, baking hot parking lot.

Where

palmpreapps — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:50:32 +0000

The “Where” Palm Pre app is a GPS enabled location-aware application that helps you find businesses close by. It’s a wildly popular app available on most major smartphones and it’s the first application on the Palm Pre that really brings a good places directory with it along with integration with Yelp (excellent for viewing user reviews of establishments). The home screen of the app presents you with a set of categories including Movies, Starbucks, Traffic, News, etc. Digging deeper takes you into more detailed information about each category that is relevant to your current location.

The information is often very detailed. The movies section, for example, will automatically pull up theater locations close to you, showtimes, movie reviews, and trailers right within the app. This is one of the best and most widely used location-aware places directory in the mobile market today, and it’s great to see it on the Palm Pre. I have no doubt you’ll be able to pick from a plethora of such apps soon, but this is a great start.

Navigation

palmpreapps — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:50:33 +0000

The Pre comes preloaded with a sophisticated and very usable GPS navigation application. This is a fully functional application that one rarely finds ready-to-go on a smartphone (often requiring a separate purchase and a download). The Sprint Navigation application does turn-by-turn navigation and text-to-speech, so you can keep your eyes on the road as you use this nifty app. It comes fully loaded with maps, and the GPS is spot on and accurate even deep within downtown, fully surrounded by buildings and other interference that usually let other GPS systems down.

Entering addresses is a breeze, and you can set favorites and homes just like most other GPS navigation systems out there. It does what it’s expected to do. Overall, a very useful and functional application right out-of-the-box with the Palm Pre.