Travel assistance on your Smartphone (San Diego Transcript column)

I've been testing two new applications for smartphones designed to assist frequent travelers while on the road. WorldMate Professional from Mobimate and Pocket Express Travel Edition. Each provide a set of utilities that enables you to check schedules and flight status as well as perform a variety of other travel-related tasks.

I tested each of the products on a Sprint Treo 700p, but they're also available for most smartphones including BlackBerrys and Windows Mobile devices. (Neither is available for the iPhone, which is closed to outside developers).

WorldMate Professional
WorldMate Pro provides a collection of services and utilities spread across a dozen screens. Its home screen displays home and world times, a tiny world map and a couple of exchange rates. Tabs take you to additional screens. A time screen provides local and four world times along with a calculator, which determines the time in any world city for a given local time. A weather screen shows the forecast in five cities, and another screen shows a satellite weather map. Others allow you to list your planned itineraries and sync them to your computer, upload flight schedules from the Web and provide real-time flight status. The remaining screens are simple calculators and tables for tipping, converting currency, measurements and clothing sizes, an index of dialing codes, and a packing list.

The flight schedule lets you upload a list of flights for the week or for a specific date. But in my testing, it never made it out of the gate. When I requested the weekly flights from San Diego to Oakland, I got a listing of the first few flights for each day along with a warning that there were more flights but the maximum query size had been reached. 

When I requested flights for a specific day, I got a longer list of flights, including several via Las Vegas but none later than 7:30 p.m. It Omitted Southwest's 9:25 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. nonstop flights, and there was no notification that it was not displaying all flights, which could lead you to think the last flight of the day is three hours earlier than it really is.

Next I used the flight tracker to check the status of a flight already in the air from San Diego to Oakland. It only showed me where the flight originated and the departure time (Denver) and its arrival time into Oakland, ignoring segments through Phoenix and San Diego.

According to a spokesman for MobiMate, these problems occur only with the Treo version and will eventually be fixed. I tried the product on a Sprint Mogul Windows phone and, in fact, it showed all scheduled flights and all flight segments. But MobiMate should not be selling the Treo version with these fatal defects and certainly should be disclosing the product's limitations.

WorldMate Professional costs $75 per year.

Pocket Express Travel Edition
Handmark's new Pocket Express Travel Edition was released this week, adding a set of travel functions to its popular Pocket Express, which delivers news, sports, 411, maps, weather, stocks, movies, and other information on demand to your smartphone.

The new travel component provides flight status, flight schedules, hotel search, currency conversion and travel phone numbers using one touch dialing to reach airlines, hotels, car rentals, and travel agents. It also includes a service that lets you speak to a live travel assistant 24/7 from anywhere in the world.

I found the flight schedules and tracker to work well, with none of the problems I encountered in MobiMate. The hotel search worked like Expedia, allowing me to locate hotels based on location, name and price, and make the reservations through its live travel component. It even provided a tiny photo of each one. I also preferred the interface, which was easier to navigate and had more information on the screen.

Live travel is a personal concierge service that can fulfill almost any legitimate request.  It will find a restaurant, book a reservation, call a doctor, reserve a limo and so forth. I tried it out, calling several times and got a very helpful person each time without waiting. TI was told that they're most often used to provide directions, book services, provide medical help, and recommend restaurants.

Pocket Express Travel Edition costs $70 per year without the concierge service and $100 with it. This includes the entire Pocket Express application with its many other capabilities.

Of the two products, Pocket Express Travel Edition is my clear preference. It's a better value and it provides more tools for solving problems that travelers typically encounter. And if you use a Treo it's your only choice.

Comments

[Steffi Edwin]

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Usually some business concerns outsource assistance services or personal assistance services when they do not locate adequate time to concentrate in their business activities. Assistance services are provided to both top executives and clients. Assistance can be provided in any service as you may necessitate. Assistants/ Personal assistants are employed only after a thorough training to support any sort of work. He does his work autonomously. They also support disabled persons and help them to guide in their day today activities. By engaging them in our work we can meet those specific circumstances accordingly.

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