Someday, someone is going to make the perfect parking app. G-Park by Posimotion LLC is almost there. While its sleek look, intuitive interface, and camera features are picture perfect, the actual parking functions – locating your spot and getting back to it – just aren’t up to snuff.
I’m not saying G-Park doesn’t work. It does. It just takes too much time. Getting an accurate position in G-Park takes up to two minutes. I don’t mind waiting a little bit for accuracy, but two minutes is too long. Parking is a mindless task, and parking apps should require the same amount of brain power. If it takes more than 30 seconds to use, I might as well memorize the spot the old-fashioned way.
That said, I do like G-Park’s Take Photo and Add Notes functions. I can take a quick snapshot and add a note to help me remember a detail about where I parked. The camera is only useful in well-lit areas – if you park on a side street at night, you’re out of luck – but that’s an iPhone problem more than anything else.
G-Park’s biggest issue is its maps. When you tap “Park Me!” you get a Microsoft Visual Earth satellite view of your location. That’s cool. Satellite views are helpful, especially in parking lots. When you tap “Where Did I Park?” though, you get the default view in Google Maps. Where did Virtual Earth go? Switching maps in a parking lot is like parking on the street somewhere and having everybody paint their houses different colors before you return.
Until it can work out its bi-polar mapping and speed up its positioning mechanism, I can’t see myself using G-Park every day, but at 99 cents, it’s earned a spot in my apps folder.
