Find out everything about new cars, trucks and SUVs with expert reviews and opinions from around the Internet. The car reviews offer a "shortcut" to researching new vehicles by summarizing other road tests and helping shoppers discover which features and opinions matter to them. Price a new car, compare vehicles, see spy shots of future cars, view and download car photos, and read the latest news on auto shows and concept cars.
That’s the description of The Car Connection iPhone ‘web app’ in the iPhone Application List. I’m afraid the site really does not live up to it. To be fair, this site looks like it may be quite a nice and useful resource *if* it’s developed and grown out quite a lot, but for now it’s not ready for prime time at all.
Here’s some quick reasons why:
The ‘Latest Car Reviews’ section is not organized or categorized in any way. So instead of being able to choose to navigate to a subsection on, for example, SUVs / family cars / sports cars, or whatever you’re after, you just get one listing of reviews. The listing is also very short – offering only 10 actual review links and then a general link to check out the main site’s various RSS feeds. The reviews pages themselves are not optimized for iPhone in any way that I can see. Upon landing on a review page, you’ll immediately need to do a fair amount of pinching and scrolling to start reading.
The ‘Photo Gallery’ section, again, is not organized into any sort of categories to help you find what you’re most interested in – it’s just one big block of thumbnails. Clicking on several of them landed me on a nice blank page with the little blue ? symbol for Flash content. And when I did get to an individual photo page, I found they had no captions or descriptions at all, to offer any clue what you’re looking at.
The ‘Find Dealers Near You’ section was erratic in its results – sometimes offering no results at all for a maker I know has locations in my city. When it does return relevant local results, it offers a very plain list of them, that fails to make use of any useful iPhone abilities to really help you make use of the listing. As in, I can’t click on a dealer’s phone number to dial it, and I can’t click on their name or address to jump out to the Maps application and get a good feel for where they are or get directions. Best of all, when I do click on an individual dealership entry, I get taken out to a *blank* Yahoo Search page.
In addiiton to the above limitations, the entire site suffers from slow and clumsy page transitions.
The Car Connection’s full site looks like it may be a decent resource. Their iPhone site however, is just a waste of time at the moment in my view.
Have a look for yourself and let me know what I’m missing:
http://iphone.caradvisorynetwork.com/
Tags: The Car Connection, iPhone web apps
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