iSymDVR - iPhone dash cam that works! ...and no longer availiable, though. See end of post!

Note: This post is best seen as a historical reference, see the update at the end of the post!



I'm back with an other one of those block rocki... oh sorry, got a little carried away there!

Seriously though, I've had quite some time to use iSymDVR now, an app that turns your iPhone into a dash camera. Well, it does it really well! I've ranted before in this post about how annoying I think it is when people review stuff sent to them without actually using it long enough to give good advice. Everyone can repeat specs and say thing like "this looks promising" and blah blah blah.

I'm not going to give you any specs, you're smart enough to find them out if you want to know them, but still it's worth mentioning that you can choose between different resolutions on the footage/film captured. There's plenty of other meaningful settings to fiddle with.

I use the highest resolution available, it's no problems at all to read license plates on vehicles in good light. The problems comes when it's low light and you have vibrations in the camera mount. I currently use a frankenmount with the suction cup and ball from a Garmin GPS that I superglued to a iPhone 4s holder. (Update 2015: I now use iPhone 5s with magnetic mount) Quite stable but not perfect, and trust me when I tell you that any vibrations will effectively blur the frames.

That's a useful feature: when you replay clips you can choose between 8x, 4x, 2x, 1/2x the actual speed, and also step frame by frame. Really useful when you want the plate numbers from some stupid driver or from someone involved in an accident. In Sweden you can text the plate number and get a reply with information about the vehicle and the owner, a really handy service. Especially when people park in front of your driveway...

Back to iSymDVR. It splits recorded material into clips of a length set by you, in my case 3 minutes, and stores them until they reach the space limit set by you. Then it simply overwrites the oldest clip and continues looping like that. If something interesting happens, you tap the screen to display a star and make it store the current clip in "Favourites", where it won't be written over. Nifty, eh? You can also set a G-force sensor to activate recording to favourites, so if someone smashes into you it safely stores what happened.


This is an expamle of a pulled frame while going 70 km/h in mixed, harsh light. The quality degrades when exporting, but you can still read the plate:

Screenshot exported from clip by iSymDVR - iPhone 4s, iSymDVR app

So what do I like about iSymDVR?

- settings for resolution, clip length, max space available for the stored clips
- export with or without info such as your own speed, time, date, GPS position
- export single frames as photos
- very stable! I use it almost every time I drive, and no hiccups
- you can have map directions running in the background
- you can display a speedometer while recording
- you can adjust screen brightness by up / down swipes. Perfect while night driving!

What do I not like about it?

- stops recording when a call comes in (iOS limitation, no way around)
- can sometimes overheat the iPhone 4s in sunny, hot weather when shooting high-res (I've since found that directing air from a vent helps cool the phone, no problem)
- can sometimes be unresponsive for screen taps when speedometer is shown



There's lots more, but this is enough I think. It works very well and is quite capable of capturing high resolution footage when driving. Which is what you want from a dashcam.


I'm using the app on my iPhone 4s, I suspect the iPhone 5s would have much better low-light performance. Say, if you could send me one I'd be really happy to try it out heh heh....

UPDATE september 11, 2014:

I thought I found a bug so I emailed Alex Crimean about it. Surprise, within 15 minutes or so he replied! That's good support! 

Turns out it wasn't a bug but my mistake, so this is still a very stable, functional app!

UPDATE 2015: Now using iPhone 5s, still works perfectly. Catches some interesting things in the traffic! :-)

UPDATE 2015 june: The developers account is terminated, so no more support for this app. That also means you no longer get iSymDVR! There is a replacement availiable though, I´ll see if I can get ahold of it to try it out. If I do I´ll post about it.