WorldMate, the popular travel planning and organizational service, has expanded its mobile reach onto the iPhone. The two different versions of the app, which were released late Tuesday night (one free, and a premium version that costs a hefty $19.99), give travelers tools to create and track travel itineraries including flights, hotel reservations, rental cars, and any appointments along the way.
The two versions of the app offer identical functionality for core parts of WorldMate's service, like a flight search tool, world clock list, currency conversion, and a heads-up display on what's on your schedule. However, the paid "gold" version comes without any kind of advertising. Feature-wise, it also adds niceties like an automatic flight status checker that, with the soon-to-be-released iPhone OS 3.0, will send you an alert if there's a delay or cancellation of your flight. It also plugs into Google Maps to tack together a rich map with all the places you're visiting on your trip.
Until it gets the live notifications, users of both versions will simply have to use the one-click "check flight status" link. This checks information against WorldMate's delay and cancellation tracker. It also lets you know about any last-minute gate changes.
WorldMate can put your entire travel itinerary in one app, and give you a heads-up if there are any delays or cancellations. It even has mini apps built in, like this currency converter (pictured right)
(Credit: CNET)The app is quite polished and ran smoothly on my phone. You can get more full-featured versions of the productivity tools that are included in the app by using other, standalone iPhone applications, however WorldMate's strength is that it puts all of those things in one package. This may seem like a trivial matter, but since the iPhone does a lousy job at multitasking, it's nice to have a Swiss army app equivalent.
WorldMate faces competition from TripIt, which has had its own iPhone app since mid-April. It does many of these things in a free package. However, it does not yet have its own notification service. Instead, it takes any delay notifications you get from your carrier and updates its own information. It's also tied into third-party services (via its API) that can alert you to potential changes to your travel plans.
(Credit:
WorldMate)
On Monday, WorldMate released an update to its travel app for Nokia and Samsung S60 third and fifth edition smartphones. Called WorldMate 2009, the application refreshes the look of previous versions with a new dashboard screen that tells you the local weather and time of your current location, and that sums up your flight and itinerary info if you pay the subscription fees for the pro version.
Aimed especially at international business travelers, WorldMate 2009 for Symbian operates on the freemium model. As with versions for Windows Mobile and BlackBerry phones, WorldMate 2009 gives you a handful of features as part of the free download. On Nokia and Samsung, these include global weather forecasts that can be read to you aloud, world clocks, a currency converter, and a day and night world map. The pro-level Gold subscription buys you personalized flight-status look-ups, full flight information, including your terminal and gate, and push alerts that warn you if your flight is canceled or delayed. You'll also be able to book hotel rooms from WorldMate in the event you get struck down by inclement weather.
WorldMate dabbed this latest Symbian version with a glossy coat of paint, and the dashboard adds a convenient way to view details at a glance. However, WorldMate 2009 will be its most useful for paying users who can access all its features.
WorldMate 2009 on Nokia
(Credit: WorldMate)
Kayak has a new iPhone application that gives mobile users the same travel search tools found on its Web site. The company is pitching it as a way for passengers who have been stranded at an airport to quickly find and book another flight. I look at it as a better way to navigate travel sites that do not play well with the iPhone's sometimes finicky browser, which is nice since Kayak simply pulls all the results together in one place.
At first blush, power users of the site may find the application a bit lacking, but the advanced features lay hidden. For instance, it does not let you filter how many travelers are in your party, or what airlines you'd like to search from. You can, however set these options after the initial search has been done. The same can be done when searching for hotels to narrow down the results by the hotel's star rating. Ideally it would be nice to set these filters ahead of the search, as it could speed things up if you're on a spotty data connection.
Once you've found a ticket you want to buy there are only two ways to do it: either calling up the airline, or buying it through Kayak.com in Safari. This second option is where things really break down since you have to deal with the carrier's interface, which is neither iPhone-friendly, nor a part of the Kayak application. This is too bad since the application could do some handy things like save your credit card information, and turn your newly purchased flight into a calendar event to stick into your phone's calendar.
On the flip-side of that, the app includes one of Kayak's most useful features--its trends reporting. Here, you can tell it what travel route you're contemplating and it shows you what pricing has been like over the past month, and what it predicts it will be in the next two weeks. In my case this got me waiting a week to buy a ticket for an upcoming trip.
There's also a handy listing of each carrier's telephone number in case you need to speak to a human. This is great if you don't feel like looking it up. Included is how many people had searched for flights through that carrier during the past week, which is cute but somewhat useless.
One thing that's sorely missing, and what I hope will be included in a future version is a built-in calendar. For now you have to pick dates from a simple drop-down menu, which is great if you know exactly when you're traveling, but when brainstorming a potential trip it's nice to see the days of the week. Luckily, at the time I was near my desktop computer to give Outlook a quick check, but you're clearly not going to have that when out and about.
See also: Taking travel services into your own hands: Becoming an on-the-go iPhone travel agent
Kayak for iPhone lets you search for flights and hotel reservations on your phone, and check out pricing trends, too.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
Teaching yourself a few niceties in a foreign language requires more than an hour in front of a phrasebook. Piecing together sentences out of unfamiliar accents and sounds is neither easy nor accurate, and could earn you looks of bemusement or horror if your neophyte's pronunciation produces a garbled or unintended communication.
That's what makes Lonely Planet's collection of audio phrasebooks for English-speakers (about $10) so eminently usable. With phrases organized into categories for transportation, money, dining, and so on, travelers can easily browse for pertinent communications. Like print phrasebooks, the foreign spelling and transliteration are present. Tapping the entry triggers the audio pronunciation. In the case of the Italian phrasebook, a quick-talking male narrates the traveler's way through trips to the pharmacy and purchasing train tickets.
Some customization features would elevate the application from basic usefulness to a true learning tool, such as offering a choice of male or female voice and speed settings to accommodate different audio learners. However, there is some succor--if you can't adequately reproduce the new sounds, just hold the iPhone up in front of a local and let Lonely Planet do the talking.
Woeful is the international business traveler who bolts across the airport to make it to a changed gate and who arrives to a meeting an hour late because of travel-addled math skills. WorldMate Live, reviewed here for BlackBerry, smooths the journey with comprehensive itinerary and flight status updates, weather reports, directions, and unit conversion tools.
The strong Web component is one way that WorldMate Live--for Windows Mobile phones and BlackBerry--differs from past and still fully functional versions of the WorldMate application for multiple platforms. Based on the information you enter on your online itinerary, the program alerts you of changes in your flight status, reminds you of upcoming meetings, and more.
For most of us, checking into work on your vacation isn't any fun, but if it's a matter of no vacation or a tampered one, we'll help you find the most efficient ways to do your duty, so you can get back to doing...well, anything else. For the rest of you who are prone to nervous behavoiral ticks if you're away from your work for too long, these tools will equip you with a mini mobile office for your own brand of paradise.
(Credit:
MobiMate)
Last November, MobiMate revealed WorldMate Live for BlackBerry. A large stride ahead of its traditional business-class travel software, WorldMate Live got some souped-up features, including online management tools and functionality to push flight status alerts and scheduling reminders to the phone.
In a few more weeks, WorldMate Live will come to Windows Mobile phones, the number two platform pick for businesses, and therefore frequent corporate jetsetters. I got a preview today at the CTIA Wireless conference, and it looks good. By "good" I mean nearly identical to the BlackBerry version of WorldMate Live, with perhaps one or two navigation and interface tweaks. Other than that, the app is expected to behave identically and contain the same content services, like currency conversion, a live itinerary, real-time weather reporting, world clocks, and so on.
MobiMate hopes to add WorldMate Live for Symbian to the product family by the end of 2008.
I liked previous iterations of WorldMate, a travel organizer best suited for power business travelers, at least in theory. The app grouped valuable travel information in one place, but pricing made it impractical for most casual users. WorldMate Live for BlackBerry is an app I can get behind, with its clean, friendly interface; fully synchronized Internet maps and alerts; and a more congenial pricing model that assumes basic, free usage and provides frequent, but never obnoxious, opportunities to upgrade.
The revamped WorldMate Live adds more value with a brand new on-app itinerary section for inputting flight, hotel, car rental, and meeting details to go along with a corresponding Web app, where you can also input information. All trip data is stored on WorldMate's servers and synced in real time when the app opens and auto-connects online. Maps, powered by Google on your online account and by BlackBerry's native map on the device, are another new addition.... Read more
WorldMate is now free for the Nokia S60 series.
(Credit: Mobimate)It's not uncommon for publishers to start nailing dollar signs on freeware products or release a pro version requiring some financial obligation. It's a little more rare, and always refreshing, to see publishers introduce a free version of a commercial product. PK Ware did it with SecureZIP back in April, and MobiMate is doing it now with WorldMate S60, all-in-one travel software that incorporates a world clock, global currency converter, weather forecaster, and time zone map that tracks night and day around the globe.
The limited-feature release offers users free reign over five WorldMate capabilities, but dangles flight schedule and flight status lookup, and satellite imagery as bait to upgrade for $50. That's a hard lump sum to swallow when mobile browsing and Google services can deliver the same free of charge. WorldMate's free version, however, offers a convenient toolkit that's useful for travelers, especially frequent time zone trippers.
For other ways to enhance your Symbian phone's performance and productivity, see my article with CNET cell phone editor Bonnie Cha on how to make your Symbian smart phone smarter.
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