I love the “Car” app that comes with my HTC-One. It replaces the phone’s usual Home screen of up to sixteen buttons, with a bigger eight-button layout that’s far easier to stab at when you’re driving. Easier? Frankly the standard home screen is so fiddly there’s no way you should be trying to handle it whilst driving.  The Car app then populates this home screen with four preset apps, and a simple swipe takes you to similarly sensibly laid out screens, so you can Phone Home with a swipe and a prod…. Clarkson could no doubt do it whilst powersliding…

To top this off I just found this article

HTC One home screen in "Car" app, showing changed lower-right icon

HTC One home screen in “Car” app, showing changed lower-right icon

on the interweb which has allowed me to tweak the only icon on the home screen which is tweakable. It is of no use to me to have SoundHound there. But Audible (Amazon’s taking book service), now we’re talking!!

(And thanks to the ease with which an Android phone can take its own picture, you can see the result!!)

To add to the fun, I have an iBolt dock in the car. This takes me back to the good old days when you can just drop a phone into the dock, not have to find the cable and insert the fiddly USB connector. The phone just drops in, makes contact with the power connector to charge, the phone also knows it’s in the dock and swithes to “car” mode automatically! Then as soon as it finishes linking to my Parrot bluetooth system it optionally resumes playing whatever music I was last listening to through the main radio.

With this added automation we’ve been listening to The Devil’s Star  as we drive across rainy, chilly France. Where are you, Spring?

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