Waze

Greetings and thanks for stopping by.  This week I decided to use Waze, the app on my iPhone.  Wow it is so much better than Sirius Real Time Traffic that is built into my car.  If you so choose you can register and report things like police ahead, accidents, hazards, etc.  You can add Facebook and other social media so that you and your friends can see what time you will arrive.  You have an option to send your location to people.  It’s just a really slick and nice app.  It does use cellular data but much to my surprise not a lot.  There is an option to show the speedometer and have it alert you with a chirp when your at or over the limit.  It chirps a lot for me, I have it set to 5 miles over.  I am all about moving when I am on the road, that’s no surprise if you know me. 

I bought a vent magnet phone holder and use it to watch the screen.  My phone came loose on the first day but not since then.  You can use the app vertical or horizontal and even choose your cars avatar.  The down side is if you confuse the app it barks at you telling you to turn left, turn left now. 

I ran a side by side comparison with Sirius and Waze when I was commuting home on Tuesday and it was pouring rain outside.  The entrance to the interstate/freeway that I use was blocked off.  Both re-routed me.  Sirius has a more accurate estimated time of arrival and their maps have much more intricate detail.  Waze isn’t bad for a free app and many people love it. 

Friday I decided to open the app but not tell it where I was going.  I wanted to see if it would give me the same warnings like hazard ahead.  Nope I had to enable a route for that to happen.  I did it with great timing because there were a couple of hazards ahead and I got my notification.  So I am using this going to and from work at least for the time being. 

The only downside is that since it’s using a lot of processing power, your battery is taxed heavily and it will drain it fast.  So either have a battery case or plug your phone in while your using the app.  I wish that I could project or switch the image on my phone to my car display, that would be cool and easier to look at.  Although I don’t pay much attention to the displays I do glance at them while driving.  I am more about the audio prompts and I can listen to my iTunes with no problem.  If your listening to an audio book it will pause the book to provide a prompt and if you don’t like that you can turn off the feature.  I haven’t tried running Pandora with Waze but that will be an interesting test.   

So I am a ‘wazer’ now.  Yahoo!