Gettin’ Carried Away

While battling my old LG flip phone and its (lack of) Internet capabilities, I began to crave a better phone so I could do all my social networking on-the-go. My hunger to access Facebook, Twitter and Myspace as quickly as I could on my MacBook at home led me to purchase an iPhone.

While the iPhone is unable to send multimedia text messages (until June, I hear), you can upload pictures to all the hip social networking websites. And that’s the reason I got the phone in the first place. However, I didn’t realize how many useful travel applications are floating around in cyberspace. There are so many, I tend to spend at least an hour searching for travel apps to download to my iPhone.

~* Photo courtesy of Inked Up *~

My absolute favorite travel app so far is the one for Urban Spoon. First of all, it’s free. Second, it finds places for you to eat, no matter where you are in the world. Third, not only does the app tell you the name/location of the restaurant, but it also gives you the price. Here are the specs:

• Once the phone locates your city, you just give it a little shake. The columns then begin to shuffle, as if you were playing a slot machine in Vegas.
• Once it stops, you’ll see name of the restaurant on the bottom. Up top, you are given the neighborhood in which it’s located, the type of cuisine offered (American, Italian, etc.) and the price range ($ = affordable, $$$ = pricey).

The next travel app I love comes from the King (or Queen?) of online search engines, Google. Free Translator does, well, exactly what it says. You type in a phrase, let’s say, “Where is the bathroom?” in English. If you want it translated to Spanish, the app will tell you, “¿Dónde está el baño?” And, honestly, you could type a whole paragraph to be translated and this app will do the job!

• Translate from English into 1 of over 25 languages!
• While the results won’t make you sound like a fluent native, they will allow you to be understood by them.

Living in Chicago, I have yet to find a flawless app for the CTA. However, since I frequent London, England, I downloaded the TubeDeluxe app. Oh. My. Gosh! This application has it all!

• You will see the status of each Tube line.
• You may change the order that the list of Tube lines appear, putting the ones you frequent more at the top.
• There is an entire Tube map available, and you can pinch-zoom in and out like you normally would on a website in Safari on the iPhone.
• A built-in function for route planning? Check!

Keep in mind, your iPhone needs to access the Internet for many of the applications you download. However, it’s a lot easier than lugging around a bunch of heavy books, maps and magazines!