HomeSpeaker (Android Review)

RATING:
2 out of 5

PRICE:
$6.99 (free trial version available)

TASTY:
Turns your DROID into a chatty, mobile realtor, using GPS and auto-fetched home data from Zillow.com to narrate home buying excursions.

BUMMER:
Doesn’t know when to quit; must reboot phone to clear from memory and stop from draining battery using power-thirsty GPS. Tends to read numbers in a slightly annoying manner – 08/10/10 is read out loud as “zero eight, one zero, one zero.”

COOL:
Mines real estate listing data as you drive, speaking out each home’s details. Also offers an overhead (satellite image or Google Maps) walking map, and loads multiple GPS locations as you skip from neighborhood to neighborhood.

REVIEW:
My wife loves to home browse. Even though she’s happy with our current domicile (I think?), she’ll eagerly mine the Sunday real estate listings to see what’s new on the Raleigh, NC market. And every few weeks, she’ll crash an open house to take a look around.

It’s a hobby.

Imagine the smile on her face when we set out one weekend afternoon to give HomeSpeaker ($6.99) a try. As you travel around, this no-frills app keeps track of your location with your phone’s GPS receiver, and will read the details of each home to you, pulled from Zillow.com.

Details like each home’s address, the year it was constructed, its current value, and its recent sales history. As we drove around nearby homes, we were surprised by some of the highs and lows of each sale, and a pair of recently foreclosed homes gave some interesting data to be sure. After an hour, we were ready to quit the app and take a break from her incessant chatter.

The app isn’t perfect. It’s hard to make “her” stop talking, and once launched, I was unable to clear an annoying gray bar telling me my current location and GPS coordinates, both in and out of the app. Using Advanced Task Killer (free) did nothing to stop the app from running.

So for now, rebooting your phone after your afternoon of browsing is the best way to go. (That and to keep your finger on the volume rocker.)

All of that said, the app will save you time ahead of any home shopping trip. That is, there’s no need to mine Zillow.com (or ask your Realtor) for basic data about the home’s your interested in. Drop into a new city, fire up HomeSpeaker as you drop in on each home, and get the latest data.

If you’re a tech-savvy homebuyer dreading the real estate shopping experience, pick up this app. It’ll help much more than it’ll hurt. And who doesn’t like to have important home information fetched and read out loud while we drive?

The app is less than a month old as of this writing. Here’s hoping a set of updates comes very soon to clean things up to make it possible to add a few more stars to this review.