Every night at 12:15 AM Pacific, Amazon gives away a free paid app through their Amazon app store. As I am usually awake at 12:15 AM Pacific, why not let you know if today’s app is useful, or just more clutter in your app drawer?
Today’s app is Speed from developer High Caffeine Content. Ordinarily $.99, Speed is a GPS-powered speedometer. Using GPS, it tells you how fast you are going in miles, kilometers, and knots per hour, just in case you find yourself in a boat. It’s an incredibly simple and streamlined interface. There are no options, no menus. If you touch the screen, it will change between miles, kilometers and knots. Other than that, all it does is display how fast you are moving.
Speed does have a couple limitations holding back my snap judgment love of it. First, you have move at least three miles per hour or the GPS can’t track you. The website suggests it is really meant more for bikes, boats, seeing how fast a train is going, etc. Second, you have to be in a place where your phone can communicate with GPS satellites. While I’m perfectly willing to write about an app at 12:30AM, I draw the line at going for a run.
Nice. I’d like to point out I use an app like this to track my speed on a bike, only I can view it after the fact (max speed, average, distance, etc). And it was free in the market- if this is normally 99 cents, and only shows what you are currently doing… well, I’d be surprised if anyone bought this outside of the free-app-of-the-day! ;)
That tends to be true of quite a few of the app of the days. Apps of the day? Really, there are only a couple of them that I have been truly motivated to download. The rest because hey, they’re free.