Cell phone apps that prevent distracted driving.

With all the talks about the dangers of distracted driving and the use of cell phone being one of the main culprit, different States are scrambling to enact various laws to outlaw driving and texting or even talking on the phone. All those laws in the pipeline or already enacted, address the issue differently with most of them making the act of driving and texting a secondary offense only enforced when the driver is stopped for another one. For its part, the fed is also getting into the act, with a federal ban of driving and texting in the work.
But until then, something needs to be done specially given the rate at which the most accident prone drivers on the road, teenagers, text and drive. For concerned parents, hopefully, there are some technical solutions available right now that would give them some peace of mind knowing that their kids' phones are not in use while they are behind the wheels.
Those technical solutions come in the form of cellphone apps that can block the ability to send or receive texts or make or receive calls or surf the Web. The extend of what these apps allow or don't allow, varies per app. But they almost all work based on the same principle of using the cellphone GPS system to sense when the car exceed a certain speed, to start blocking whatever they are set to block. Here a list of some of them to just name a few: iZup, tXtBlocker, CellSafety and ZoomSafer. The list is far from being exhausted with new apps or services being made public almost every day.

For more, see NYTimes.com