Have You Seen Speed?! On Your iPhone?
August 18, 2008 by Ryan Ray
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No, this isn’t Keanu Reeves talking, but have you seen Speed? I know the sequal sucks, but it’s not true about the Speed I’m talking about. This is a full blown iPhone app. It’s just been updated from it’s first version and it is rockin’. If you can’t guess it yet the app Speed, does just what its’ name implies… IT MEASURES YOUR SPEED! Just tap on Speed’s icon while you are walking, while you are in the car (not driving), while your on the boat (not driving again), and even check your speed on your bicycle. Anything that you can think of where you just sit up and wonder, “How fast am I going?” Speed is good for.
I had heard about this app a few weeks ago, and at the time thought, “Hmm, maybe I will check out this app sometime.”I second guessed myself because I read some reviews and all they talked about was that it’s a little too buggy at the moment. Their speed wasn’t registering right, the app would crash, etc… The usual complaints but the developer promised an update was coming. That update came as soon as Apple approved it and today I took the plunge to download it. Let me tell you my first impressions of Speed
Speed is developed by a man named Steven Troughton-Smith , you can check out his website at that link as he develops more than one app for the iPhone. Speed has a beautiful interface, it really hits the sweet spot for me in terms of usability. The big circle that encompasses your speed reading is clear and is the obvious focal point, and the subtle leather background is clean and simple. A very nice touch indeed. Kudos to you Mr. Troughton-Smith for a great interface. The interface itself is quite simple, it rotates if you want to see your speed in landscape or vertical. Speed comes measuring your speed, no duh, in Km/h but with a simple tap in the bubble you can change it to MPH. Thanks for including us ignorant Americans who use the English system while %90 of the world uses metric. Increments of ten, what rubbish!! 
So how does this application measure your speed you ask? Well it has to ask that pesky question when you open the app…”May speed use your location?” You click OK and Speed will start measuring away using GPS locations. I’m sure there are some complex calculations going on as this computes your speed. Apparently from the developers website it will start measuring your speed once you are going over 4 Km/h. This just goes to show exactly how sensitive the GPS unit inside the iPhone is. Remember when those New York Times folks thought the iPhone’s GPS receiver was too weak for turn-by-turn directions? They should read websites like ours before making such remarks! We nuts know better. I took a run up and down the street in the rainy weather today to test this and indeed it does work. The good thing about this update is that it now measures in increments of 1. The first version did it by 5’s I believe, making accurate speed impossible to measure with the app.
Overall this is one of my favorite free and simple apps from the app store. Click HERE to download it for your own iPhone. I plan on testing this app more vigouresly tomorrow, and a video will be included then added to this post. So check back tomorrow for my finishing remarks on the new and improved app, Speed.
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