14 March 2008

CarMeter for S60 3rd Ed
Take complete control of your car with your Phone

CarMeter can measure your acceleration and displays the g-force in real time on your display! This is a fascinating new idea of how to use the acceleration sensor in a mobile phone makes driving your car even more fun!

In addition to entertainment, the application will also greatly increase your safety when driving a car.

If the forces in tight turns are getting dangerous, CarMeter will instantly display an audio-visual warning – reminding you that you should probably slow down a bit.

The acceleration due to gravity at sea level is about 9.8 m/s2 – this equals 1 g. While this force is directed downwards, you can artificially generate forces in other axes - with your car. Upon start-up, the application automatically calibrates according to its 3D-position and then continuously calculates your acceleration forces and displays them in g.

A warning is also implemented for the second off-road mode, which is made for driving off-road. Instead of measuring your acceleration, CarMeter constantly displays the current tilt of your car. This enables you to finally see how steep the hills you're driving on really are! Again, the application displays a warning if the tilt is beyond the usual critical tilt of the most common off-road cars (for current off-road cars, the limit is about 23°).

Best of all, all of these feature are made as easy to use as possible. Just put your Nokia 5500 into the mobile phone holder of your car and start the application. CarMeter will automatically detect its orientation and calibrates so that it can measure the tilt and acceleration accurately in any possible position.

The only bad aspect of this soft is the fact that it is optimized for the strange Nokia 5500 screen and at the same time lacks the scalable UI and therefore doesn’t looks that good on the phones with QVGA screens like Nokia N95 or Nokia N82 but it still works just fine and could be useful for you ;)