Traffic Edge Reviewed

Posted
by
Kyle McInnes
on June 22, 2005, at 8:05 AM
in Reviews
.
Comments: 2 responses
2 Comments

Traffic Edge
We all know the feeling of being caught up in traffic thanks to an accident up ahead. Some of us try to avoid the situation by listening to the radio but they usually just do reports around rush hour time. Another way is to get real-time web traffic camera feeds online but for that you need to be in front of a computer with internet access. So of course a company decided to bring the web cameras to your Blackberry which you’ll always have access to, be it in the office or on the road. This program is called Traffic Edge by MAQ Software which takes those feeds and allows you to view them on your Blackberry. Read what we have to say about the program …


Installation

There are two versions of the program, a WAP and BES version so make sure to install the proper one. The size of the program is 46kb.

Review

When you first start Traffic Edge for the first time you’ll be asked to subscribe to a city to receive the camera feeds. You can choose multiple cities at a time incase you travel frequently. We were disappointed to see that the majority of the cities are located in The United States with only a select from Canada, England, Austria, and Australia.

Viewing web feeds is very easy, when you select a city you’ll be given a list of the cameras available in your area. However the screen shots are not uniformed throughout the program, for New York City feeds the shot is tiny but if you were to look at the feeds in Toronto the shot takes up your whole screen. Another issue that we came upon is that some feeds are not real time. We looked at Time Square during the middle of the day but the capture shows a night time shot, which just makes us wonder how old the picture is, could be a picture taken months for all we know. Other shots have a time stamp on the bottom corner so we know exactly when the picture was taken. Most of these shots show a screen capture a few hours behind, which when it comes to traffic can make the difference of a easy drive home or a 1 to 2 hours traffic jam. Seeing that our city wasn’t included in Traffic Edge we can not verify how true and up to date the feeds are which totally defeats the purpose of the program.

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  • http://www.edgeQ.com TrafficEdge Support

    Thank you for TrafficEdge review. Here are additional comments from MAQ Software that publishes TrafficEdge (www.EdgeQ.com).

    1. We are looking at adding map legends to make it easy to understand Traffic maps.

    2. Time discrepancy mentioned is not accurate. TrafficEdge application shows device time stamp when the screen was displayed (along with image showing target city time e.g. EST along with the traffic conditions). For example, timestamp shown of the New York traffic image (EST) is local time where as the TrafficEdge reviewer may be in a different time zone (e.g. Pacific time zone.)

    3. There are three Blackberry editions of TrafficEdge and not two. Two editions are mentioned in the review. We offer a version specifically for Verizon 7250 Blackberry devices. In addition, we have Treo and Windows Mobile editions also.

    4. We publish thousands of DOT traffic cameras across multiple cities. A small percentage (1% or so) of those cameras are down for maintenance by DOTs at any given time. It is possible that a given camera is not available at a particular time.

    For most of the thousands of users that have downloaded TrafficEdge, the application has produced great results. We have received very positive comments from users.

    We will continue to improve and further add features and cameras.

    Thank you for your support.

  • http://www.edgeQ.com/ TrafficEdge Support

    Thank you for TrafficEdge review. Here are additional comments from MAQ Software that publishes TrafficEdge (www.EdgeQ.com).

    1. We are looking at adding map legends to make it easy to understand Traffic maps.

    2. Time discrepancy mentioned is not accurate. TrafficEdge application shows device time stamp when the screen was displayed (along with image showing target city time e.g. EST along with the traffic conditions). For example, timestamp shown of the New York traffic image (EST) is local time where as the TrafficEdge reviewer may be in a different time zone (e.g. Pacific time zone.)

    3. There are three Blackberry editions of TrafficEdge and not two. Two editions are mentioned in the review. We offer a version specifically for Verizon 7250 Blackberry devices. In addition, we have Treo and Windows Mobile editions also.

    4. We publish thousands of DOT traffic cameras across multiple cities. A small percentage (1% or so) of those cameras are down for maintenance by DOTs at any given time. It is possible that a given camera is not available at a particular time.

    For most of the thousands of users that have downloaded TrafficEdge, the application has produced great results. We have received very positive comments from users.

    We will continue to improve and further add features and cameras.

    Thank you for your support.