Review: autoTRADER for BlackBerry

One of Canada’s leading marketplace for buying and selling vehicles, autoTRADER, was made more readily available as a Blackberry application a couple of months ago. Anywhere you are, you can whip out your BlackBerry and scour through listings to find the car of your dreams; like you need an excuse to pull out your BlackBerry anyway. If you find one that sports a Mr. Fusion, a flux capacitor and has the ability to fly, I strongly suggest you pick it up right away. Read on for more.

About autoTRADER

autoTRADER was developed by the Yellow Pages Group; who also have their own app for Yellow Pages Business Finder and Canada411 People Finder. autoTRADER is available for a wide array of BlackBerrys, including; the entire Pearl, Curve, Storm and Bold line-up, the 88xx series, the Tour and the Torch. It was made available in the BlackBerry App World on October 25th, 2010. The current version is 1.0.0 and has a file size of 573 KB.

BlackBerry App World rating: 2.5/5

Price: Free

Kicking the Tires

Each time you launch autoTRADER, the first thing it does it attempt to find you. You’d think it wouldn’t be too difficult, seeing that you are holding your BlackBerry and all. Your location is determined using GPS, but you can also enter your location manually. From the main menu, three drop down lists at the top of the screen allows you to choose what to look for, which city is your focal point and what you want your search radius to be. The radius ranges from 25km to all of Canada. If you rely on manually entering your location, you should know that autoTRADER does not save the last used location if you exit the application.

autoTRADER main menu

Through this application, you can search for items like ATVs, watercraft, heavy equipment and, of course, cars. Below the 3 lists are the main options you use to navigate. They are: Find a vehicle, Find a dealer, My Listing Alerts, My Favourites and Post and Ad (free).

Depending on what you selected as type of vehicle, autoTRADER will display a list of makes and models. After making your selections, a list of vehicles are presented to you. If available, details such as; images, asking price, mileage (or is it kilometreage?) and location will be listed. Almost everything you need to know about the vehicle can be seen with this app. Zoom in on images to see your future car up close and personal. Well, as personal you can get from a BlackBerry screen anyway. Within your selection, you could potentially call/email the seller, view the location of the seller on a map, potentially view their inventory, save it as a favourite or even post it on Facebook.

autoTRADER car list autoTRADER car details

When looking up dealers instead of vehicles, you can see their address, website and inventory. Again you can also call or email them. Unfortunately, it can’t divide the honest dealers from the dishonest ones. Selling a car? No problem, autoTRADER makes it easy to post your ride for someone else to take over. The fields are quickly filled in, which speeds up the posting process (and hopefully selling).

autoTRADER create alert autoTRADER post a sale

Even through an app, a search for a car can be frustrating. autoTRADER includes a listing alert option that will email you when an entry that matches your keywords and search radius is posted. The frequency can be set to daily or weekly; depending on how desperate you are to buy a car. It’s up to you – you can’t get as frisky as you could in the back of a car if you’re at the back of a city bus.

Conclusion

Like others, I found the autoTRADER app to possess a quick response time and detailed listings. Well not detailed in all cases. This of course depends on the one who listed it in the first place. The UI is crisp, clean and easy to navigate. I’m hoping that autoTRADER will reduce the stress I’ve experienced in finding a suitable vehicle that fits my lifestyle, needs and budget – it hasn’t been fruitful so far. You can pick up autoTRADER, for free, from BlackBerry App World.

Pros