The Best iPhone Apps for Your Car

Friendly Computers found this article useful for iPhone users and would like to share it with you.

Whether it's your daily commute or a random road trip, your iPhone can help you drive, park, and stave off passenger boredom. Here are our picks for the best iPhone apps for when you're on the move.

Maps

Your built-in iPhone Maps application can be hard to beat. It's free, it's simple, and it gets the job done. Through Maps you can get driving, walking, and public transit directions. You have access to map, satellite, and street view. While it's not the same turn-by-turn phenomenon that's packed into Android, it gets you where you need to go and also works pretty well as a replacement for the (figurative) yellow pages. Despite having tested several different turn-by-turn navigation apps, I always find myself coming back to Maps. It's just easy to use and it works. [Pre-installed]

MapQuest 4 Mobile

If you do need some vocal assistance in your navigation, you can pay a lot for great GPS apps. (We've always had an affinity for Navigon on the premium side.) If you don't want to pony up, though, MapQuest 4 Mobile is free and does a pretty nice job. Of course you could opt to pay for a slightly more refined option, such as the $.99 MotionX GPS Drive, or something more social, like Waze, but MapQuest 4 Mobile is a great solution for turn-by-turn navigation on your iPhone. It's straightforward and simple, but isn't without features. The app will let you discover points of interest and nearby places to go as well as save destinations for later reuse. [iTunes App Store]

Gas Buddy

Gas Buddy will help you find the cheapest, closest gas station based on a set of criteria you provide. While it's very much a unitasker, Gas Buddy is very good at what it does. If you're looking for a particular grade or even need to find a diesel station, Gas Buddy will help you sort through your options and round them up based what's more important to you—cost or proximity. When you find a gas station you want, Gas Buddy can map out the directions for you. Gas Buddy will set you back $2.99, but it can pay for itself after one or two trips to fill up your tank. [iTunes App Store]

Beat The Traffic

Every time I make the trip out to Los Angeles there's at least one accident on the way. This makes for bad traffic and that's where Beat The Traffic comes in. Beat The Traffic scopes out all kinds of traffic issues and lets you discover the best route to take. It's saved me from ending up in a highway-turned-parking lot several times, and it's completely free. [iTunes App Store]

G-Park

Parking lots and structures might as well be mazes. If you've ever been subjected to either, chances are you've lost track of your car. G-Park doesn't rely on just one method to help you remember. First, it lets you mark your GPS position. Second, you can take a picture of where you parked to provide a visual memory. Third, you can specify the level and parking spot code so you can be absolutely sure where you left your car before heading out. For 99 cents it can help keep you sane after your next trip to Disneyland. [iTunes App Store]

Pandora Radio

A long drive gets boring pretty quickly without some music, and your tired old playlists can't always cut it. The popular Pandora Radio helps you discover new music based on music you already like, runs in the background (for iOS 4 users) so as not to interrupt your turn-by-turn navigation, and is free to use (although you can pay for extra features). If you're looking for something new to listen to during your drive, Pandora's a good way to find some alternatives. [iTunes App Store]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5628138/the-best-iphone-apps-for-your-car

The Best Android Apps for Your Car

Friendly Computers found this article very useful for android users.

Having an Android along for your daily commute or occasional car trips can make the ride a lot easier, safer, and simply more fun. Here are our favorite Android apps to have on hand when it's time to hit the road.

Note: We've included links to each apps' homepage, which usually include a QR code for easy installing or Market search directions. We've also included a link to each app's page on AppBrain, where signed-in AppBrain users can easily beam the applications to their Android phone.

Maps, Navigation, and Car Mode

Maps, Navigation, and Car Mode all come with your Android (version 2.0 and higher), and they're all crucial to the Android-in-the-car experience. Maps is less useful when you have your hands on the wheel, but the ability to "Star" locations from your desktop or laptop browser, then quickly pull them up for directions on your phone, is very nice. Navigation, as we've previously detailed, is an entire turn-by-turn GPS navigation package, as long as you're not driving too far away from a data signal. The Car Mode makes pulling off Voice Actions and getting Navigation directions safer while your hands are occupied, and Maps' break-out app, Places, gives you a chance to see a simple list of nearby restaurants, gas, ATMs, or other spots. [Free on Android phones, but check Market for updates]

Vlingo or Voice Actions

If your phone's running Android 2.2, you can upgrade your phone's built-in Voice Search to the Google-built Voice Actions. And if you're double lucky, Voice Actions won't frequently crash on you, as it does currently on at least a few of the Lifehacker editors' phones. With Voice Actions, you can write texts or emails with your voice, search Google, activate directions or Navigation, find or call businesses—all after only touching the screen once, making it a very helpful and safe car tool.

If you're not on 2.2, or can't get Voice Actions to play nice, you want Vlingo. Actually, you might want Vlingo anyways, if only for the SafeReader function.

Vlingo's a third-party app that does pretty much everything that Voice Actions can do, but uses its own server to pass your voice commands along. It even offers its own keyboard with a dedicated Vlingo button for entering your voice in any text field (great for those stuck on much older firmware), and can take over the default action for holding down your Search button. Even if you like Google's own Voice Actions better, you can install Vlingo and use its SafeReader function. Set up the app with your email accounts, and it can read your incoming email, and text messages, out loud for you, whenever you've activated SafeReader from a home screen widget. Pretty amazing functionality, really, for a free app. [Homepage: Voice Actions, Vlingo] [AppBrain:Voice Search (Voice Actions), Vlingo]

Waze

Google's Maps & Navigation wants to get you where you're going through search, data points, calculations and voice recognition. Waze, too, gets you there with turn-by-turn directions, but it also wants you to run over cupcakes, share interesting spots and details about your trip, and help you avoid traffic jams, accident scenes, speed traps, and find good stuff through the power of social reporting. Anyone who's running Waze on their BlackBerry, Android, iOS device, or other phone while driving is feeding into Waze's maps and traffic data, and those who really dig Waze can compete on picking up power-ups, share traffic tips, point out free parking, and otherwise lend to the community spirit. [Homepage] [Waze]

Listen, Pandora, and NPR News

Your car is probably the one spot where you can really enjoy new tunes, get in-depth with your podcasts, and listen to the news uninterrupted. For Android owners with time to listen, Pandora, NPR News, and Listen are the best. Listen is Google's own podcast app, with great search capabilities, subscription syncing to Google Reader, and a pretty smart setup for deciding when to refresh and download your audio. Pandora is, of course, the very nifty streaming service that creates "stations" based on artists and songs you like, and it works just fine wherever you can get an internet signal. NPR's own app for Android can stream your local station and download entire show episodes, but also has a very handy ability to cherry-pick segments of shows like Morning Edition or All Things Considered, then queue them up in a playlist. [Homepages: Listen, Pandora, NPR News] [AppBrain: Listen, Pandora, NPR News]

GasBuddy

GasBuddy does one thing and one thing well—points out the places where you can fill up your car for less. On an Android, GasBuddy can map out or list nearby stations using your location, or search out spots where you're heading to. You also get details about the station, including an address you can navigate to. [Homepage] [AppBrain]

ParkDroid

In cities, at stadiums, and other places where you walk a long way from where you park your car, you might have once said, "Boy, I should draw a map!" Now you just open ParkDroid, tag your location with your GPS powers, then go about your day until you're ready to head back home. ParkDroid is more than just tagging, though. It pulls up paid and free parking locations from the web and maps them out, then also takes in free and paid parking finds from its users (unless you opt for "Private" when tagging). If you're parked at a meter, or need a time limitation, you can set that up in ParkDroid, too. [AppBrain]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5626711/the-best-android-apps-for-your-car