You may laugh... But I’ve finally moved into the 21st century and got myself a smartphone (iPhone 5)!

Never bothered till now as Norfolk (unless you happen to live in Norwich) has never been that smart when it comes to phone signals, but as of last week I can actually get a 3G signal in North Norfolk without having to climb to the top of a church tower, praying to the gods and waving my phone at the heavens!

Now to the point…

Apps appear to be a bit of a mine field – there are so many, some crap, some good, some free, some bloody expensive!

What apps are worth having and what aren’t? What are you lot all using? What are your favourites? Particularly after biking/travel related apps (but I’m up for anything else that might amuse me!)

Be great to have a thread dedicated to some useful motorcycling apps. So what are you using…

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If you are out on a ride with mates that also have smart phones, then you best download the app called Find Friends, that way if one of you's gets lost, the lost party can send you his position, and you received his exact latitude, longitude and can find him / her easily.

You should have Google Maps better than the Ordnance Survey Maps these days.

If you want the ultimate Sat Nav app its not free but cheaper than a Garmin (tenner) and that is CoPilot Live. very very good.

If you live in London and your bike is kaput, and you are left on foot, there's an app that tells you what bus / train to catch to get you back home and even points out on the map how to get to the bus stop and that app is: CITYMAPPER London

If you are with the AA recovery then you ought to download the AA App because if you breakdown in the middle of nowhere at night and you don't know exactly where you are, the app send AA your exact location so they'll find you.

Also get an app called Around Me, once again using Satellite pointers, it will find you the nearest, restaurant, petrol station, chemist, mechanic whatever. you just search for it and the app will list you all the options near you

I can't think of anything else...

For up petrol heads, I find the motorsport calender fantastic, just about everything on there

Speedhud is pretty good, displays speed reversed on screen, so you can place your phone on the dash of the car for a heads up display reflected on the inside of your windscreen

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you win some, lose some, crash some
K+N filter, snorkel removed, homemade kev mod (with his blessing), co raised,
Pipeworx cans, r1 led back light, under tray removed, small indicators, handguards, cnc short levers,

I don't have an apple product, but have read about Viewranger, which is a a free GPS mapping app that works on both.

http://www.viewranger.com/en-gb

Allows downloading of openstreetmap maps and online/offline route planning.

I'm currently researching replacements for my laptop based photo and GPS trail management while on the road with an android tablet and came across viewranger and it sounds very promising for the GPS side of things.

You can also buy "tiles" (100sqm) of OSM maps at 10p a tile.

I used to have an app called MCN Ride Logger on my iPhone 3. Nice bit of kit, cost about a fiver. It logs your ride and gives you a dashboard with max speed, max accel/decel G, average speed and so on. Also it can display a map of your ride with the speeds and Gs for each section, and the usual time and distance information etc. It was fun to play with, but needed a bit more development, as an incoming phone call could switch it off in mid-ride, and sometimes it needed shutting down an re-starting when it froze. Downside (and this applies to any app that uses the GPS chip) is that it gets very hot in use and eats the battery alive, so it needs to be kept in a cool location and really needs a permanent 12v supply.

I upgraded to a iPhone 4 and the app was not compatible. I have not bothered replacing it with a newer version. Fun while it lasted, kind of thing.

There is a free satnav app called NavFree which works well, but I think it needs a 3G connection to work, i.e. the maps are downloaded on the fly, not stored.

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XT660R (2006)
XT600E (1994)
Triumph Trident 750 (1992)
My blog: http://goingfastgettingnowhere.blogspot.com/

Good luck with that Pleiades !!!!
I got myself a smart phone for my first trip to Morocco a couple of years back, IT BLEW MY HEAD UP, far to complicated , back on a BRICK now !!!!
Phil

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"I'm here for a good time, not a long time"

My advice.... if you have a job to do, and you have to think about it in any way, search the App Store.

Apps that are great in one persons eyes are hours you will never get back in another....

My Apps (although as a techie I wouldn't touch iOS with a long stick) revolve around Hexadecimal and Binary conversions and some wireless snooping and sniffing apps. I have some mapping (OS and Google), both ground and celestial, on the phone and I wouldn't use the phone as a primary navigation tool if my life depended on it!

There is a Swiss Army App, has some basic stuff, torch, calculator, ruler, magnifier glass and a rather cool spirit level. Once calibrated it suits me rather well.

Other than that, I use it mainly for social networking and silly little games - some are good, some OK most are utter crap.

One thing I will say by way of advice, iPhones are very fragile - get a decent cover for it.

And watch how your apps use data, Android has some very good data management features, not sure about iOS, but look into it.

My wife got her first smartphone just before Christmas, she was a complete technophobe, but she uses it all the time now.

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>-------<

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

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go on you know you want to

Erm...? What ever floats your boat I suppose!



This one's intriguing...

http://www.bunsentech.com/products/d...ious/index.php

How on earth can it work out your wheel/crank horsepower?

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If there is a facility to input the mass of the vehicle + driver/rider, then calculating bhp from the rate of acceleration should be fairly easy. A mass x accelerated at rate y requires power z, and so on. Needs some sophisticated mathematics, but that's what computers are good at. I would imagine the figure for rwhp will then be extrapolated to get the crank hp. If they are keeping it simple, they might add say 10% to the rwhp figure. If you get the chance to provide data about the transmission (chain/shaft, auto/manual etc) then it could be made slightly more precise.

Any data from this device would be extremely approximate, I would have thought.

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XT660R (2006)
XT600E (1994)
Triumph Trident 750 (1992)
My blog: http://goingfastgettingnowhere.blogspot.com/