If you have already owned a Galaxy device, you are familiar with the concept of Driving Mode. This mode get activated when you are in the car and provides some shortcut for quick access to some necessary apps like Maps, or Navigation while driving. Car Widget uses the concept of Driving Mode and offers a neatly designed home screen to enable driving mode on Android devices. The widget size is 4×4 and the size can be increased for devices with larger screens like tablets and the main task of this widget is to add 6 shortcuts to home screen.
When you first add the widget to home screen, you need to assign tasks for these 6 shortcuts, from running an application to opening a system settings or starting a navigation. There are 6 themes to choose and you can also change the background color, icons theme, scale of icons, rotate icons, change font size & color, hide/show titles and more.
There is also the option to create a backup of the settings and restore them on your device (after a factory reset) or other devices with Car Widget installed.
The InCar mode detects when you are in car and perform some actions as soon as you get in the car. The application detects you are in the care if one or many of the following rules get correct: When power cable connected, When headphones connected, When Bluetooth device connected, Activity recognition (uses Google Play services to detect activity). When you are in the car the application can perform following actions: Disable screen timeout, Change the brightness, Turn on Bluetooth, Route all incoming calls to phones speaker, Auto answer to incoming calls, Change volume to defined level, Turn off WiFi, and Autorun app. The InCar mode also lets you add up to 3 shortcuts in status bar for a quicker access.
What we liked about Car Widget, other than its functionality and its usefulness while driving, is the simple user interface, available customization, and the idea of InCar mode in general. But What we didn’t like about Car Widget is the lack of option to change the number of shortcuts which is fixed to 6. The other thing is about InCar mode which we believe it could have had more rules for triggering the InCar mode, like using NFC.
If you are one of those who need their device while driving, especially for routing and navigation, then Car Widget is a wise choice and is worth trying. Note that the InCar mode gets activated only for 30 times and after that you need to upgrade to the premium version
Download Car Widget from Google Play
