Trail Buddy - Review - Taylor Agpich

Trail Buddy is a location tracking application for your Windows Telephone that tin be used for hiking, biking, geocaching and other activities that require GPS and/or mapping. Trail Buddy'southward features include:

Create multiple trails with waypoints (aka points of interest) and tracks
Beginning, pause, stop runway recording and view electric current location information on one easy-to-read page
View your location, waypoints and track on a map (accessing maps requires a practiced quality connexion)
View accumulated stats at whatsoever fourth dimension for the current trail
Pre-define waypoints or capture your current position along a trail - you lot tin can even set a waypoint from the map
Take pictures directly from the waypoint page

To see how well these features work out for Trail Buddy, take the spring past the break.

App Layout

Trail Buddy is laid out nicely making the most out of the Windows Phone Metro Mode. The Abode Folio has tiles to access the Assist Section, Maps, Trail Buddy's settings, read About the app, and skip over to the Tracker feature.

Trail Buddy Main Pages

Trail Buddy'southward Assist Department is an extensive guide for using the app with quick links to get you to certain areas of the Section and the text is touch zoomable for easier reading. It besides supports horizontal viewing for easier reading likewise.

Trail Buddy Settings

Settings encompass how you desire the application to perform (gps on/off while non tracking, keep the screen on, etc.), how you desire your units of measurement displayed, and map options. Trail Buddy uses Bing Maps and you can choose between three map styles; aeriform, road and aerial with labels.

The Map view includes a handful of button controls along the bottom of the screen. You have controls to zoom in, middle the map on your location, zoom out, and search. The 3-dot carte du jour pulls up commands to fix a style indicate, admission your settings, and capture a screenshot.

Trail Buddy Map

Asides from the Abode Folio, Trail Buddy also has pages that will listing your trails, waypoints, active tracks, and trail statistics. The Trail Folio is basically a collection of your recorded tracks that were generated from the Tracker Page.

While you can fix a way point from the map view, you can as well create way points from the Fashion Signal Page. You enter a descriptive proper noun, the latitude/longitude is automatically recorded (you can override this if your not at the manner point'southward location) and have the ability to use your Windows Phone camera to further document the way point. Additionally, way points tin can be shared via email or SMS with others.

Trail Buddy Way Point

To review a previously recorded track or trail, tap on the listing on the Trail Page to highlight the item runway. So go to the Habitation Page and tap the Map Button. Your trail will now be pulled up on the Bing Map, highlighted by dots. Bread crumbs came to heed when I starting time saw the dotted line and would have preferred a solid, highlight line to represent the rails. The dotted lines work but on the move may exist hard to selection upwardly at a glance.

When you highlight a previously recorded trail, whatever waypoints associated with that trail volition be displayed on the Waypoint Page and the trail'south stats volition exist displayed on the Stat Page.

Performance

In taking Trail Buddy out for a test drive, the app did a decent job of pinpointing my location with accuracy and compiling my travel stats. Waypoints were simple to create and the photographic camera office was a nice addition to document things.

Map load times were noticeably tedious and I don't know if it's a software event or due to the amount of information the app is pulling from Bing. At first I idea the lag time was due to a poor data connection but the lag times were consequent even when a full point was present.

The interface takes a little getting used to also. At that place'due south a lot of back-and-forth move to get to where you lot want. For instance, I retrieve information technology would be better to accept a button on the trail description page to view the track on the map. Instead you have to highlight the trail, and so get to the Main Page and and so tap the map tile. The app navigation won't drive you crazy just it volition have a petty getting used to.

The one overnice feature of Trail Buddy's map brandish is the power to capture screen shots of the map. Yous can document your starting point, where you parked your automobile, where your hotel might be, or your camp site location. It's a dainty feature should you loose your data connection.

Overall Impression

Trail Buddy is more than a track back application such as BaseCamp but not as en-depth a tracking application every bit Outdoor Navigation. Trail Buddy rests somewhere in between the ii. Trail Buddy has plenty of features to brand information technology a very useful outdoor tracking app and avoid beingness overwhelming. In using the waypoints, I can see Trail Buddy being very useful every bit a geocaching app.

One downside I found to Trail Buddy is that at times it took a considerable amount of time to load the maps and larn a GPS fix. There are a lot of variables involved in this and so I tin can't place all the arraign on the awarding but information technology was noticeable.

I exercise wish the trails were marked on the maps with a solid line that was easier to choice upwards on and the navigation was a lilliputian smoother. To Trail Buddy's credit these aren't critically fatal flaws but instead only features yous have to become used to.

All in all, Trail Buddy is a nice, "notch above basic" tracking and mapping application for your Windows Phone. In that location is a free trial (as opposed to trail) version bachelor for Trail Buddy and the full version runs $.99. You tin can download either over here (opens Zune) at the Marketplace.

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