Genetically Superior

In fact, it’s the only application in the iPhone’s new library of (awesome) applications that I didn’t mind paying for. And I paid a lofty $12 for it too.

Now that I’ve hyped it, Dynolicious is a super-sweet employment of the iPhone’s accelerometers: it measures the acceleration of your car using its advanced three-axis accelerometer.

Of course, I was skeptical from the beginning. I wondered whether the sensors in the iPhone would be sensitive enough to give accurate readings, and wondered if it was just a glorified stopwatch that was more gimmick than gearhead gotta-have. So after leaving work one day, I took the long way home and did some time trials.

I live at the edge of Columbia, Missouri so it’s easy to find long, flat, empty, straight two-lane roads all around my home. It didn’t take long to find a suitable one, outside the city limits and the range of police patrols (I hoped).

Keeping an eye out for traffic [of course], I launched the application and set my iPhone down on my center console. I revved my engine, tapped the Start Test button, waited a couple seconds for the application to calibrate, and then dropped the clutch.

My ’96 Nissan Altima—all 150 horses of it—jumped and raced to the 60 mph mark. When Dynolicious had calculated I had traveled 1000 feet, it vibrated to signal the test was over. The results:

0-60 in 12.2; 136 HP

Which seemed to be pretty accurate. I was soft on the clutch, so I didn’t get the quickest launch I could have. As for the 136 horses, the application is set to measure horsepower at the wheels, so a 15 HP reduction from engine to wheel is definitely acceptable, especially before taking engine mileage and the rough estimate for weight that I input to the system into account.

[For more on the accuracy, read here]

The skidpad feature is pretty sweet as well. It definitely makes driving the twisty two-lanes more fun, even if glancing down to check the current g-reading on a blind curve qualifies as abhorrently dangerous.

My advice: if you’ve read this far and have stayed interested through the gearhead gobbledigook—and own an iPhone or iPod Touch—buy it.