Trapster: Speed Trap Alerts for iPhone

Trapster is an innovative new app in the iTunes App store that uses your iPhone to alert you of approaching police speed traps, red light cameras, and other kinds of law enforcement related traps. It's another innovative use for the Wi-Fi and GPS features of the iPhone 3G, and it's free.

The vendor implies that the app is a kind of high tech shout out to fellow drivers, akin to CB radio and flashing headlights to other drivers warning them of impending speed traps ahead.

As you drive along, the iPhone alerts to you a trap ahead via an alert sound that plays with different alert sounds for different events. If you are driving along and spy a speed trap simply tapping the screen will mark your current location as having a speed trap. There's also a rating system, which can be used to validate repots.

The application requires an account that you can set up on either the iPhone using the App itself or by browsing to this website with your computer.

The program itself works fairly well, but some of the complicated sharing and reviewing features will be difficult to use while your vehicle is in motion. The map displayed by the App cannot be manipulated like other Apps that use the iPhones mapping features something most would find annoyingly unexpected, but this is by design since it's supposed to locate traps near your current location.

If you are consistently in a hurry, a race car driver, astronaut, pilot, always late, or your favorite song is I Can't Drive 55--the police have heard all these excuses of course--you may want to try Trapster.