APPS FOR THE TRAVELING MAN OR WOMAN
Introduction:
To keep up in today?s fast-paced business climate, you have to move quickly. Smartphones make it easier to keep up with your business while you?re out on the road or about town. If you?re new to the smartphone lifestyle, here are some of the essential apps you should have downloaded onto your iPhone or Android to support you in your travels.
Travel Tools:
Travelers need a couple of these tools to keep track of their travel plans and to help them find their way if they become lost. Here are some of the better tools. One or two of these should be on every traveler's Smartphone.
Tripit:? Tripit helps you organize your personal travel itineraries through your email accounts. ?Tripit puts airline tickets, hotel or dinner reservations in one place. All you need is a confirmation number. ?Last-minute changes, flight delays and cancellations all get reported to your email. Best of all, signup is free.
FlightAware:? If you are a heavy flyer and have to keep track of a lot of flights, FlightAware tracks your flights, notifies you of flight cancellations, boarding, delays, flight information and where your plane is. Available for six Smartphone platforms, FlightAware is free.
Google Maps for Android: ? Google's Android navigation software is part of the Google Maps application and comes pre-installed on many smartphones. The app uses the phone's GPS system to navigate trips by car, public transit or on foot and compiles lists of schedules, bus, ferry, and train routes.
Tom-Tom for iPhone:? If you have an iPhone, Tom-Tom offers a fully-loaded GPS app for $100 that has almost as many navigation and mapping features as its stand-alone GPS devices.
Tele Nav GPS:? Arguably the best GPS app on the market, Tele Nav is easy to use;?it's free and offers voice-guided GPS, traffic updates, maps and even business listings and attractions near your destination.
AccuWeather:?? When you?re traveling, it?s always nice to know how to dress for the weather. ?AccuWeather updates weather data on demand using the phone?s GPS to check forecasts at any point on the map.
Food, Fun and Supplies
Everybody's got to eat. Seasoned travelers know how important it is to be able to find good restaurants when you're out on the road. ?Here are several good apps. Some offer guides to entertainment and shopping as well. You should have at least one of these.
Open Table:? OpenTable gives you an edge when it comes to making restaurant reservations. It finds nearby restaurants that have an open table and snags you a reservation.
Yelp:? Yelp offers a mobile app that accesses its restaurant reviews and allows you to browse restaurants by name or location. You can filter your search by price and hours of operations.
Poynt:? If you're exploring a new town, and you want to know what?s close to you, Poynt finds nearby businesses, restaurants, gas stations, and even people and events. The app also provides basic weather info, as well.
News Readers
Keeping up with the news can be important to the busy business traveler. A newsreader app can help you keep up with what?s going on in your field. Some even learn what kinds of things you read regularly and present them to you first. They don?t call ?em smartphones for nothing.
Pulse:? Alphonso Labs' Pulse is optimized for touch-based devices. Pulse allows you to read full stories from RSS sources and pulls links from Facebook. The app is free for both iPhone and Android.
Taptu: ?Taptu, a free and easy-to-use aggregate news reader, lets you choose which news you want to read and mark stories to read later. ?Taptu allow almost uninterrupted news access even where reception is poor.
Readers
On the road you never know when you?ll need to take a look at a document. ?Load up a couple of these apps that let you read documents downloaded to your smartphone.
Adobe Mobile PDF Reader X:??Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) is the grandaddy of document sharing. Adobe?s reliable free Mobile PDF Reader X covers all PDF platforms, devices and most smartphone types.
Aldiko: ? Aldiko, an independent reader app, offers a clean, sharp interface that lets you adjust type size, brightness and facilitates downloading ebooks in both ePub and PDF formats.
Kindle:? ? The free Android Kindle app provides surprisingly readable text on a small smartphone screen. Kindle makes downloading books simple.
Document Management Utilities
Dropbox:? Dropbox lets you store files online and share them with other computers and devices. It syncs files so changes are made on every computer and device linked to the Dropbox. ?Dropbox is a free download. A basic login account comes with 2GB of storage. A ten or twenty dollar monthly premium account gets you 50 and 100 GB.
Evernote:? Evernote is another cloud application that stores files, web pages, images notes and anything else online and syncs your data across multiple computers and devices. Searchable by tags or content, it even does optical character recognition.
Quickoffice:? Quickoffice is a versatile office suite for smartphones. The free version comes with limited features. Premium versions ($5 and $10) allow editing of Word and Excel files and access to Dropbox or Google Docs. A third version ($15) for iPad adds the ability to view and create Powerpoint documents.
Web Utilities
KeePass Droid:? For the security conscious, KeePass Droid helps you remember all your complex, highly secure passwords and use them on your smartphone.
Communication
Communication apps help you keep up with social media accounts and instant messaging. ?A browser, Skype for video calls and a good social media organizer simplifies keeping up with your peeps no matter where you go in the wide world.
Opera Mini 6:? Opera Mini, a mobile version of the Opera browser, improves browsing on the Internet. Opera?s servers reformat pages for minimal bandwidth and display them cleanly on your smartphone screen. Opera doesn?t support Flash, but more than makes up for this shortcoming.
TweetDeck:? Most smartphones come with Twitter apps, but TweetDeck allows you to edit?retweets and offers feeds from services like Facebook. ?TweetDeck offers a simple, intuitive interface. If you?re a tweeter, TweetDeck?s free app will streamline the process.
Skype Mobile:? Skype Mobile lets you make video calls from across the country or around the world. ?Skype-to-Skype calls are free. Buy Skype credits to call any number anywhere.
HootSuite:? HootSuite is a must-have social media management tool for online social media marketers. HootSuite links Facebook, LinkedIN, Twitter, WordPress, Myspace, FourSquare, Ping.fm, and mixi accounts to your smartphone. With HootSuite you can write or update new posts, check your site?s analytics, schedule posts and reply to readers and customers. HootSuite comes in a free version and as a pro account.
Facebook Mobile:??Facebook Mobile manages your Facebook account, and lets you upload photos, post updates and check on your friends. If you only do Facebook, this may be the one social media app you need.
Ebuddy:? Ebuddy supports all the major instant messaging tools - MSN, Yahoo, AIM, Gtalk and ICQ as well as social media like Facebook and MySpace. ?The app is inexpensive ($5 for the iPhone version) and available for a variety of platforms.
Financial Apps
Every traveler needs to calculate exchange rates and manage money. If you sell goods or services on the spot, one innovative app even takes credit cards via your cell phone.
Square:? The folks at Squareup have a nifty software/hardware solution that lets you swipe a credit card and take payment directly to your bank account from a smartphone. ?Signup and download are free. Squareup sends you a little square piece of free hardware that plugs into your headphone jack for swiping credit cards. The Square app lets you take VISA, MasterCard, Discover and American Express cards for less than a 3% per transaction charge - no monthly fees.
XE Currency: ?XE Currency is a free app for iPhone and iPad, optimized to convert exchange rates and prices for all world currencies and precious metals. XE is available for iOS devices, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7.
Currency Banknotes:? Currency Banknotes for iOS costs only 99 cents. It calculates exchange rates and shows you pictures of more than 150 world currencies. If you visit a lot of places, knowing what the money looks like can help you avoid getting ripped off.
Upvise :? Upvise lets you run a paperless office from your smartphone. Upvise keeps books, records expenses and even keeps time cards. Upvise offers a free version with limited functionality and storage space and a premium app for $50 per year that also tracks invoices, sales, deliveries and work orders. Upvise makes the boss on the go job a bit more doable.
QR Scanner for Droid?and QR Scanner for iPhone:? A QR Scanner scans the QR code boxes found on products and in advertising all over the place. Scan the QR code with your smartphone an it takes you directly to a website. ?This version lets you create QR code boxes of your own.
Entertainment
Pandora: ?Pandora is probably the one app that makes an unlimited voice/text/data plan for your smartphone essential. Pandora lets you pick a song or artist, and the website programs a radio station to play similar songs. ?Pandora plays only songs you?ll probably like, including ones you?ve never heard before. It tweaks its playlist as you select favorites or reject selections.
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