ETA in an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that provides you with live traffic information for any destination you’d like to travel to. It’s a pretty bare-bones app that may only be worth getting if you commute long distances to work.

The app can open up in either one of two screens, airports or favorites. By default, it will list information for the three closest airports. For all saved locations, the app will show you the total miles, travel time, delay and arrival time. Tapping on a destination will open up a new screen with turn-by-turn directions. These directions are only printed, not spoken. Obviously, to safely follow them, you would need a passenger to read them aloud to you.

The traffic data provided by the application is fairly accurate and may be useful to someone who has a long daily commute to work. However, there are a bit too many faults to justify making a purchase here. First of all, you must manually type in a destination in order for the app to calculate the arrival times and directions. If you’ve used any sort of GPS device before, having to manually type in your destination will probably drive you nuts. However, if you are using this to simply check the traffic delays to the same destination everyday, then you’ll only need to type it in once. Also, the most significant problem is that the app isn’t 100% reliable. The traffic data may or may not be as precise as it should be. You may be surprised when it says there are no delays while you are actually sitting in heavy traffic.

Even though the UI is pretty basic, there are a few improvements that should be included in a future update. The blue arrows next to each destination are not functioning. They will flash if you tap on them, but you’ll need to tap on the box itself to get to the directions page. Also, I don’t think shaking the iPhone to get updated travel times is the way to go here. Shouldn’t the travel times update automatically? Lastly, the directions are very simplistic. It would be nice to see turn symbols and how many minutes it should take to get from intersection to intersection.

It’s very easy to compare this application to a full-featured GPS. There are no maps, points of interest or spoken turn-by-turn directions here. But, that’s really not what ETS is about. It’s a simple app that will tell you how much of a delay there will be on your way to your destination. That’s it. So, based on what it says it does, it’s a good app for all the commuters out there. It may also be a good companion to a GPS app that charges for live traffic data. ETA may be a much cheaper solution. I think I may keep this one on my iPhone, just in case.