Trapster Mobile Phone Application Review

This week I had to travel from the Hartford area to the Syracuse area, which is about a five hour drive.  When I purchased my Droid, I also purchased a universal car mount for using the navigation feature, but I knew the route which was mostly highway so I decided to load the Trapster application to test it out on a long highway trip.

Trapster is a popular application on the iPhone and available for many other smart phones and navigation units, and if you don’t have a smart phone or supported navigation unit, you can get text alerts and report traps with a toll free telephone number.  For more information directly from the company, check out their website at Trapster.com

Before leaving on my trip I downloaded the application from the Android market, there is a quick signup form that you can do directly from the application or on the website from a PC.  I would suggest signing up before you are ready to go because you do need to get an email with a confirmation code in order to login.

Once logged in, you will see a Google Map with a traffic overlay there will be a blue dot on your location that is not pictured below with a red bar flashing in the direction that you are traveling.  I was unable to simulate that in my picture since the phone is connected to the PC to get the screen shots.

As you approach speed traps you will see indicators as shown below, there are different colors based on the confidence level of the person that reported the trap and whether it has been confirmed by additional people.  There are also different icons for the type of trap such as live traps, police often hide hear, red light cameras, speed cameras, etc.

Trapster Screenshot

If you hit the menu button on the Droid you will see the options below, I accidentally hit the map at one point and it stopped following me.  If you just hit the locate button, it will place your blue beacon in the middle of the screen and move the map accordingly along your trip as long as you don’t hit anything else.

Trapster Options

If you hit the Report Trap button, you will see the options below for entering the type of trap.

Trapster Report

Another feature which I didn’t notice until I was almost home can be found if you click on the More button and create a trip.  This allows you to create a trip and allow others to see where you are and you can make it visible to the public or only people with the URL.  You can share the URL and send it directly from the phone.  This seems like a great feature for providing to people so you don’t have to call and let them know where you are, they can just check online for an update.

Trapster Trip

Now that you have seen the screenshots and some of the options, the real question to determine how good the application works is whether it does a good job of notifying you of speed traps.  Overall, I think it worked well, it notified me of a couple hidden traps that I would not have seen without it and only missed a couple traps in some remote areas between Syracuse and Albany where there are not as many travelers.  There was a fair amount of times when a trap was indicated and I did not see an officer, but I didn’t mind that because it only meant watching your speed a little bit instead of missing a trap and getting a ticket.

With the screen constantly on and the GPS active it did wear the battery down pretty quickly.  Fortunately, I had a car charger that reached my window mounted unit so I plugged it in after a couple hours.  It would probably be fine for a daily commute, but I would recommend having a charger for longer trips.

I also would not have found it as useful without the window mount or something on the dash so you can see the screen without looking down.  In the location where I have it mounted it is easy to keep your eyes on the road and glance at it.  There are sound notifications, but I either need to adjust them or turn my radio down, probably the latter.  I did see a few notifications in the notification bar, but it flashed and goes away fairly quickly and it was easy to miss when you should be watching the road.

Reporting a trap also seemed fairly easy, but I was not comfortable messing with it while I was driving.  This may become more intuitive as I am driving in areas that I am familiar with instead of longer trips.  I think the ability for people to submit traps is a major factor in how well the application works.  It works well and as more people download the application and continue to submit traps it can only get better.  I would recommend everyone download this application, find it on the Android Market or go to Trapster.com to find out how to get it for your device.

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This entry was written by Gerry and posted on December 2, 2009 at 10:11 pm and filed under Android, Applications, Internet, Review. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

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