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With all the video dash cams coming out of Russia and China and other nations because insurance fraud is so high, I thought I would try a dash cam app on my Android Samsung Galaxy S3.

After all here, in the St Petersburg / Pinellas Park area we have seen in the news in the last year several insurance fraud schemes by people forcing rear end collisions.

So I did a search for dash cam in the Google Play market place and grabbed the top rated app, DailyRoads Voyager.

It is a nicely laid out app and records beautifully. Uses GPS to record position and speed and comes with a host of recording settings.

Got to say it’s an easy to use product in that it works right out of the virtual box.

You need to take time to figure out how to use it however, and I ran into a couple of problems right away because I didn’t want to leave my display running. So in my first use of it, utilizing the default settings, I clicked on the record button then once I realized the screen wasn’t going to turn off, I clicked the button on my phone to turn the screen off. This turned the video recording off.

The way to get around this is to go into the settings for the app and turn on background recording. You can also click on the check boxes to display a recording buttons which get overlaid on the screen so that you don’t have to be in the app to start and stop video. This seems to bring up another problem that I’ve had to learn to work with. Once you launch the app and start recording then turn the screen off so as to conserve battery, if you try to go back into the app it creates some kind of conflict on my S3 that says the camera can’t be initialized. No doubt because the video is recording, but I don’t know at that point how to stop recording and start a new recording and I’m not sure but I think it causes the current recording to cease. So what I have to get in the habit of doing is stopping the app with the overlay button.

Naturally, it is a big battery drain. Most my drives around town take twenty to thirty minutes so that can kill battery power pretty fast particularly when keeping the screen on. So if you’re going to use it, it’s best to have the phone plugged in to power.

The default video setting went to my phones highest video setting and it is amazing how good that video is but it’s way to large to be practical and will quickly eat up memory so I set the video to a lower setting. I like that it beeps every time it saves video to memory so that I know it’s recording when the screen is off. These two videos I recorded give an example of the quality. The first is during the day and the second during the night. There is no sound as I’m sure you probably wouldn’t want to hear what I was listening to on the radio.

And:

I think it’s definitely an app worth trying. There’s a lot more to the app that you can make use of like uploading video to their servers to share with other users.