Favourite Phone/Tablet Apps for the Car April 2014

Post date: May 26, 2015 8:36:58 AM

Favourite Phone/Tablet Apps for the Car

April 2014

With Smartphones (& Tablets) being so advance nowadays, there are so many useful Apps that can assist and make our car journey much better and nicer. It’s like having a mini computer in your car! Here’s some of our favourite Car Apps. Please bear in mind that we are using an Android base phone but we are sure IOS for Apple phones would likely to have them as well. Of course we are also using the Mountek car mount to put the phone/tablet ideally right in the middle of the car dashboard for handsfree and easy view/access. Drive Safely!

(1) Car Dock App - CarHome Ultra

A car dock App makes your smartphone easier and safer to use whilst driving. Essentially it allows your phone to be customized and only show dedicated Apps to be used whilst driving without clouding it with all other Apps which you would not normally use whilst driving.

Our favourite car dock App is the CarHome Ultra. This app allows you to customize up to 30 short cuts to your favourite car Apps such as GPS/navigations, music players, internet radios, vehicle performance tracker, phone call, message, etc. It also has a default music player.

If your car has Bluetooth connectivity, this App can be set to turn on automatically when you start your car, and automatically turn off (& revert back to your normal phone home page) when your car is shut down. It even announces the location automatically and the local weather when you tap on it. How cool is that!

(2) Navigation App - Waze

This is our favourite navigation App at the moment. Simple to use and best of all, besides the normal navigation directions, it allows us to have real time information on traffic conditions, accident alerts, & most useful of all..ahem..police roadblock alerts. Like in all other navigation/GPS, it provides you with the time to destination, but this App is more accurate as it takes into consideration real time traffic conditions.

It's a community based app, where users help each other by reporting real time events. I guess that's why it's becoming popular in Malaysia especially with information on traffic jams and of course.. operasi polis.

(3) Music Player App – Rocket Player

There are many music/media playing Apps available such as Google Play Music, Poweramp, doubleTwist, WinAmp, Rocket, Shuttle, n7player, etc. Most of them provide pretty the same functions but have different layouts and appearance. Of course everyone will have their different preferred music/media player.

Our favourite is Rocket Player. We like this App because for the free version it allows us to play quality music files with free lossless audio codec (flac) whereas for most other apps you have to pay. Of course, there is also a paid version with more features. This player has themes that you can personalize, a 5 band graphic equalizer (paid version has 10 band), browse & play your music by albums, artists, genres, songs, podcasts, folders, composers, videos and playlists.

(4) Online Streaming Radio App - XiiaLive

There are also many online streaming radio Apps available for local and worldwide radio stations. It’s amazing nowadays that it’s so simple for us to tune in to radio stations on the other side of the world with the advancement of internet/broadband, compared to 20 years back when we have to get a short wave radio to tune to blurry sounded BBC channels.

Our favourite online streaming radio App is XiiaLive. It delivers streaming music and internet radio that has more than 40,000 radio stations from around the world (gosh..it will take 110 years just to complete listening to all stations if we tune in to 1 radio station a day!!).

It supports a number of streaming radio formats including aac, aac+, m3u, mp3

, mp4, mpeg, ogg and more. You can search all the different types of music genre (there are even channels dedicated to news, sports and comedies) that you want, tag and save them on your favorite list for easy access. It even has an equalizer to fine tune the sound.

(5) Car performance monitoring App – Torque

This is a cool App to have especially for those who like to monitor their car’s real time performance. However, you would need to get an OBD2 bluetooth adapter to use this App. The OBD2 bluetooth adapter is easily available in Malaysia with prices ranging from about RM50 –RM200. Just plug the OBD2 bluetooth adapter into your car's OBD socket, connect your phone/tablet via bluetooth to the OBD2 adapter, and you are set to go.

With this Torque App, you can see real time performance of your car, get OBD fault codes, and lots of sensor datas. It’s essentially a car performance/diagnostic tool and scanner that uses an OBD2 bluetooth adapter to connect your car’s ECU and transmit datas to this Torque App.

You get to layout various gauges/meter on the car’s performance that you want to see such as horsepower, torque, throttle, speed/acceleration timings, engine temperature, co2 emission, coolant, acceleration and rev meter, air-fuel ratio, battery voltage, etc. It's nice to see all those info in real time. For the paid version, you get more features and also some cool and attractive gauges/meter themes.

It even does fault code scanning of your car via the ECU (just like those done by car workshops). This is cool especially for speedster wannabe & you don’t need to buy those gauges/meters to put all over your car.

Cheers & Drive Safely!

Mountek Malaysia

April 2014