Palm Pre Goes On Vacation: Travel Apps Reviews

Sorry for the drop off in posts, I’ve been away a bit on vacation. We drove from Provo Utah with an awkward shaped couch that we had to essentially partially load on top of the passenger’s head in order to fit it in the car we were taking, driving about 8 hours to Truckee California (near Tahoe). After liberating ourselves of the couch, we headed over to Berkeley CA and stayed at the Rose Garden Inn right on Telegraph Rd. near the University, where we saw Wilco at the Greek Theater the next day. We also took the Bart to China Town in San Fransisco, and took a trip to check out Napa Valley’s wine country.

(I rated these Apps for this particular trip on a scale from epic fail, fail, pass, and epic pass)

Weather App Reliability

First off, the AccuWeather App was a pass. It was accurate on almost all points except for taking into account the Berkeley humidity and wind chill, which causes the cool night air to be pretty chilly for a Los Angeles child and coming from a hot Desert Utah summer. The Accuweather App has the Real Feel temperature (the temperature that it should actually feel like to a human being, which I have no idea they even come up with this number; the idea of empiricizing a subjective feeling? Can someone more qualified please enlighten me?).

The first night in Berkeley was pretty freezing for 60F Real Feel in other words. The rest of the weekend however was very accurate in terms of the Real Feel. Napa Valley was balmy yet breezy, the perfect weather for a Chardonnay from Jessup.

Sprint Navigation

Navigation was pretty awesome and worked exceptionally well for the time I used it. I had the Navigation on and the music on, plugged into this FM Transmitter. The navigation with music worked like a charm, bringing down the music volume whenever the nice lady had a new instruction. When we’d turn off the highway for some gas she’d have a conniption and tell us to turn around.

Google Maps as a Navigator

Because I felt like Navigation was more of a strain on the battery because it required to run constantly, I used Google Maps Navigation the majority of the trip. The majority of the time we were driving, we were on I-80 for 650 miles, so the nice lady from Sprint Navigation wasn’t giving me any juicy tips on how to get home for a while. However, when navigating where there are a lot of turns in rapid succession on a shorter journey, Sprint Navigation is the way to go.

Google Maps was a bit buggy for me in a certain respect: searching for a destination in “directions” mode. I found that Google Maps, at least on my Palm Pre, struggled to find a business or general name of a place unless in the General search mode. While in directions mode I constantly got errors telling me that my destination was too broad, even if I was typing in something as exact as Discovery Inn Nappa Valley California, of which there are only one. When doing the same search with the general search function, it yielded very relevant results. At that point I was able to go back to directions mode and the exact address from the search I performed was automatically populated into the destination field, making this only a slight inconvenience.