Testing: Ultimate Mileage Tracker and Battery Saver

[William Huston]

I am a newly licensed agent and i have been told i need to log my miles for deduction on my taxes so i have been researching all of the different options out there. I have installed a few and played around with their features and so far MilesIQ seems to be the easiest to use out of the handful i have been testing out, Triplog works fine when i have it setup on fully automatic, but boy does it drain the battery and when i tried to set it up to use a OBD2 dongle i purchased to save power it has not been able to reliably log miles, it seems to miss any trips i sit to long in the car before taking off after it initially detects the obd2 device.. hurdlr seems to be just as accurate as MilesIQ in the fact of logging miles driven and its completely free to use, but the whole selecting which is business and which is personal feature of the app is a bit odd and slow, when you mistakenly swipe one as a business trip and it was suppose to be personal, for the life of me i have not figured out how to correct this in the app and there is no login website to try and correct it either, i am waiting for reply from help request on that step... 

So, i was thinking i was going to just leave MilesIQ on my phone and upgrade it to a payed plan when i realized i was kinda upset with how much it task my phone.. out of all the apps i have tested, according to android battery task manager, driving the exact same trip to test each app out.. i noticed that MilesIQ just barely, but pulls ahead in using the most battery power while its in use and when you're just walking around and not logging miles, the constant checking of the phone's sensors to detect if another ride is in progress really makes my cell phone battery drop much quicker than it does without the app installed, so i started looking into other options that were not app related and a few popped up with the most accurate and favored one being the Miles Ace, but some have stated the device died between 1-2yrs after purchase and many people complain about how hard it is to setup the wifi feature on the device and if you dont drive for week or so, the device can sometimes loose its settings or just act weird and fail to log rides.. so i dug further and found some people use the OBD2 dongles, which cuts the battery usage of many tracking apps down to a fraction, because the device is no longer checking its built in accelerometer sensors and such 24/7, now only doing it once the OBD2 dongle is detected, but still many claim that some car charges struggle to keep up on some model phones or the rate of offsetting the discharge on the phone is very slow, causing your phone to recharge at very very slow rate compared to without the app running.. 

So, today i had this bright idea pop into my head while talking with a friend about it, because i was going to get all nerdy with it and build a raspberry pi with andriod so i could run the apps and just install a GPS addon to the pi, when i realized i have a few old cell phones in the drawer i no longer use that are basically paper weights at this stage in their life, so i pulled them out and picked out an old samsung s4 i replaced with my current samsung note 4 and booted it up after charging it for a few minutes and wiped it completely clean, the only app i installed for my test today was MilesIQ on the phone and set it up to my home wifi... i drove to the mall today to take the girlfriend shopping and to test the idea out, i turned off drive detection on the app on my Personal cell phone so it wouldn't log the miles and all i did was plug the old Samsung S4 into my charge cord in the car and layed the phone in my cup holder for the entire trip there and back... on my personal cell phone the notification that a trip was in progress never showed up, but the S4 it did.. and when i arrived at the mall i checked the app and it never showed any new trips added... When i got home from the mall this evening i checked it again shortly after arrival and all the miles from the trip to the mall and back were listed on the app and online once i logged in.. so test 1 was a complete success and it is able to keep track of the miles completely separate from my personal cell phone without draining its battery and uses an old cell phone i had no use for to operate it and track via gps.. 

I am going to continue to test the idea out with a few more trips using the old cell phone as the miles tracker... i am unsure if all apps are available to do this method of tracking, but so far MilesIQ seems to be functioning in this fashion.. BONUS!, you can swipe which are personal and business from your personal cell phone after the 2nd cell phone has uploaded the data via wifi.....