autoinsane

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• More

It’s inevitable. You’re driving along all of a sudden the familiar outline of a Crown Vic is sitting at the side of the road. All of a sudden the hyper-sensitivity to anything you could possibly be doing wrong kicks in and your brain starts listing off every minor traffic violation you’ve committed in the last fifty miles. If you happen to be going slightly faster than speed limit because you weren’t being judicious enough in monitoring your speed, or you were trying to pass or maybe you just had the Motorhead up too loud you might panic and pump the brakes, slowing down to below the speed limit “just to be safe.”

If you’d like to avoid the anxiety and you have a smart phone you might just be in luck. Trapster, is a community of motorists that map out speed traps, red light cameras, and combo cameras. Trapster puts out a number of applications for smart phone users like Blackberry and the iPhone as well as integration with some GPS units. When you are approach a known speed trap or red light camera Trapster will alert you.

While this application has been out for a little while they just released a significant update. We decided to see just how reliable this free piece of software was. While we found the users had made notes of all the major sitting points of most of the local cops and cameras on our 80 mile commute. However, the interface still lacks a bit of polish, specifically in the Blackberry area. We tried it out on an iPhone 3GS and found it to be a bit better at giving notifications (the actual pop-ups never worked on the Blackberry Tour we have). One noticeable difference between the iPhone version and Blackberry version is the iPhone uses Google Maps while the Blackberry uses Microsoft data.

One of the gripes we had about the previous generation was the alert itself. We could never hear it over the radio. That was fixed with an update that offered many different voices for the alerts, including Bill Clinton, Austin Powers and George Bush. To its credit, it also did connect with our Sync system however it would not interrupt music like incoming calls would or play over the music. Admittedly, this is a minor flaw considering the market of Sync and the fact that this is free software. But, darn it- we wanted to have our cake and eat it too.

Trapster offers numerous other options and features including traffic mapping and alerts to new speed traps in your area. Users can submit new traps and vote on traps from either the web interface or the phone itself. The caveat with Trapster is that it relies on users in your area- but with over 2 million users, chances are if you are in a major city there’s probably a good amount of coverage.

We’ll leave the debate about whether this curbs or encourages speeding for the comments.

Related posts:

1. Santa’s Helpers Cover Up Naughty Red Light Cameras In Tempe
2. Ford pumps up Sync with AppLink
3. Volt Owners to Get iPhone, Droid, and Blackberry Apps
4. Hands on: Sirius / XM streaming for iPhone & iPod Touch
5. Viper SmartStart, the iPhone app that can start your car