Reviews August 27, 2009

Palm Pre App Catalog. 30 Apps in 30 Days. Day 27: Mileage Monitor

This is a pretty simple app, but one which could be quite useful to those folks who spend a lot of time in their cars, whether that means travelling long distances, or commuting into town each morning. This app lets you use your Palm Pre to track how many miles you are getting per gallon of gas, and how much money you are spending on gas.

To begin, just create a new account with the name of your car. Enter the current odometer reading and you are good to go. For the most accurate results, you should start with a full tank of gas.

After that,each time you get gas, just enter the new odometer reading, along the amount of gas you put in your car and how much you spent to fill the tank. The app will then spit out a summary showing how many miles per gallon you have achieved since your last fillup, as well as lifetime. It will also tell you how much you have spent (on average) for 100 gallons of gas.

I thought this was a nifty little app which could be helpful to a real niche market. Then again, what it offered was really not much above a basic algebra problem. An industrious user could easily work out this information with a pencil and paper. There was also a lot more this app could have done to increase its usefulness and usability. For example, it could have given you much more information about your average cost per gallon, and plenty more. Heck, it could even tie into the GPS and give you more detailed information about how you used the gas along your route. Overall, while I liked this app, I just thought it could have offered an awful lot more information that it did.