Internet sites held some promise in finding a bargain, but they re only for the kind of people who think about buying gas before they leave the house.
Mobile apps, though, are another matter. Pull into a parking lot, open the right app and you may be able to save a dollar or two on your next fill-up. Over the course of a year, you might even save enough money for a decent meal out.
Tightly construed, this category is filled with adequate, if unspectacular, apps like GasBuddy, which is free on and Android devices. But if you widen your search slightly, you can find other products that offer the basics, only better, and have other useful features.
In this respect, Where and Poynt, both free on , BlackBerry and Android devices, are the most valuable players; they offer information on nearby food, businesses and entertainment locations and gas stations.
Those who are willing to pay a bit more for polished turn-by-turn navigation apps like Navigator or s VZ Navigator also get local gas prices as part of the bargain. But at around $120 a year, they re no bargain.
Those who care about gas prices and nothing else will most likely appreciate GasBuddy the most if they re lucky enough to live near like-minded people.
GasBuddy on iPhone finds your location and lets you find gas stations based on proximity and price. The sort-by-distance feature will be highly useful if you are running out of gas in an unfamiliar place, and it includes a map from so you can find your way.
But the sort-by-price feature is this app s most promising element, and unfortunately, this feature often falls short because it depends on people using the app or going online to report the prices. If no one happens to report prices for nearby stations in roughly 24 hours those stations won t appear on the list. In other words, you have to start the app and hope that your town has at least a few active GasBuddy contributors to help you out.
My town in the Connecticut suburbs apparently does not.
Last week I drove to our busiest thoroughfare, Route 1, which has seven gas stations along a roughly one-mile stretch of road, and parked within sight of a , a and a Mobil. None of the stations prices showed up on GasBuddy s search, nor did prices from three other stations that were within a mile of me. For good measure, GasBuddy misidentified the BP station as Getty.
The nearest station with listed prices was four miles away, and its price, $3.24 a gallon, was 2 cents a gallon higher than the BP station I was parked near.
Still, if I were in a more remote area, I could use GasBuddy to tell me whether the price was in line with the local market.
In bigger towns than mine, GasBuddy is more useful, because prices in and around cities are updated with good frequency. If you re curious about how your own town would fare, check GasBuddy.com, which is run by the same company that developed the app.
The price is the big hitch with the more deluxe offerings of AT&T Navigator, VZ Navigator from Verizon and Sprint Navigation. The services generally cost $10 a month, but some of Sprint s all-inclusive plans offer this feature as a free add-on, and iPhone owners can pay $70 a year for AT&T Navigator.
I ve tested these apps fairly extensively, and in my experience they offer generally reliable directions. AT&T Navigator and Sprint Navigation, which are from TeleNav, are easier to use and more fully featured than VZ Navigator.
In my drive through town, these apps found the stations that offered the lowest prices that GasBuddy didn t find, including a Citgo station that featured $3.23 a gallon.
I d recommend the turn-by-turn navigation apps for those who don t want to buy a GPS navigation unit or Sprint users who qualify for the free app. But if saving money is the priority, or if you already have a GPS unit for directions, these apps make little sense.
Perhaps the smartest approach for even casual gas-price watchers would be to download Where, a free iPhone and Android app. It checks your location and finds local stores, restaurants and entertainment attractions, among other things.
On gas prices, Where was adequate. It found the inexpensive Citgo station I d seen on the turn-by-turn navigation apps, as well as two stations immediately nearby. In all three instances, Where s prices were a penny higher than the actual prices, but that s an error I could live with.
More troubling was its listing for a Gulf station, at $3.23 a gallon. In reality, the cash price was $3.26 and the credit price was $3.29.
Poynt, a competitor to Where was less full-featured. The app uses GPS location to offer nearby gas prices, and it, too, lists information about local restaurants and movies. But the app wasn t as refined as Where. Poynt s definition of nearby, for instance, sometimes included locations 45 minutes away.
On my gas-price trek, Poynt also missed the stations nearest to me. But it turned up an independent operator four miles away selling gas for $3.13 a gallon.
Wait $3.13 a gallon starts to sound like real savings. Thankfully, I did a little math before heading out. A 15-gallon fill-up would have saved me $1.50 on the same purchase at a nearby station, but the drive would have burned about that much in gas.
The math also delayed me long enough to notice that I was nearly running on empty, so I pulled into the BP and filled up.
That little independent station is going on my list, though. If I could plan ahead even slightly and fill up there, I could save about $75 a year.
If only I were that sort of person.
Quick Calls
Line2, the iPhone app that lets you make inexpensive calls and texts, is now on Android. The service is free for the first month, then $10 a month. … The app, which previously existed for only, is now also on iPhone and Touch devices. The app features free full-length videos of PBS shows.
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