Review: Road Angel Mobile
Score:
84%
There have been numerous attempts to create S60 software to help your progress on the UK's roads, ranging from a simple GPS compass to several full-blown satellite navigation systems (e.g. Route 66, TomTom Mobile 5, Wayfinder), but to my recollection only TomTom Mobile 5 allowed any kind of integration of speed camera locations.
Now, obviously, speed camera warning is an emotive subject, with one school of thought stating that no warning should be needed or given, since you should always be travelling under the speed limit and thus have nothing to fear. At the other end of the spectrum, speedsters proclaim the idiocy of some current speed restrictions and love the fact that they can go faster, slowing down when warned of an upcoming camera. Road Angel thus walk a fine line, in trying to appeal to the latter camp while justifying its existence to the former. The way they've chosen to do this is by widening the parameters of the application, from just speed cameras to school congestion zones and accident blackspots.
Sign up and installation of Road Angel Mobile is all over the air, with link sent through to your smartphone and then installation and database download all happening via normal GPRS. The whole process uses around 600K of data transfer, enough to be noticeable (£4 or so) if you have a pay-as-you-go SIM card but otherwise a simple matter of waiting a few minutes while the download is in progress.
Once up and running, with the database downloaded/updated, Road Angel Mobile is super-smooth, from opening title screen to fast menus and dialogs, with super-configurable operation and a well designed main screen layout. It scans for a connected GPS and, once selected, automatically finds it and connects each time, without hassle.
As you can see, the main Road Angel Mobile display is designed to be clear and easy to take in at a glance. I liked the compass point display across the top, I liked the way GPS fix quality was displayed as a phone-style bar and I liked the way the camera warning screens came up with red backgrounds when travelling faster than the speed limit (i.e. you could trigger the camera). It turns out that this is just one of the ways in which Road Angel Mobile is more intelligent than the average application. For example, the primary school alerts are only shown around school drop off and pick up times (8-9:30am and 3-4:30pm)
I found camera alerts to be very timely, with a beeped countdown to each one. The exact proximity to each camera for alerts can be tweaked, along with just about everything else in Road Angel Mobile, in the 'Settings' module. I liked the way the main smartphone time can be automatically adjusted to that from the GPS satellites.
Although the main Road Angel Mobile database seems comprehensive, there's a facility to add your own locations, if a new camera or blackspot has arisen. Such additions are uploaded to the central Road Angel team on your next update and reviewed, before including in the database for others. All very sensible.
Interestingly, Road Angel Mobile works on a subscription model, charged at £5 for the initial purchase and £1.50 a week thereafter (though see the Road Angel web site for a free sign-up offer until the end of October 2006), all charged through your normal SIM network phone bill. In practice, with regular database updates, there will be extra data charges from your netork provider too, but at least using this model there's no big initial outlay.
Now, as mentioned at the start, the whole concept of being warned about speed cameras has ethical issues, and your own views will play a part on whether this is an application for you. There's also an issue in that it's only available for S60 2nd Edition smartphones, a very static and comparatively low end market now - there's currently no 3rd Edition version in development, so all N and Eseries devices are out in the cold. Hopefully this will change.
At the end of the day though, I have to rate Road Angel Mobile based on how well it does what it claims to do. On my test Nokia 6630, it performed impeccably in every regard and is as close to a 'perfect' application as I've ever seen.
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at