Jinfo: Holiday Express: Taking the Mobile Web on Holiday

Holiday Express: Taking the Mobile Web on Holiday
Jinfo Blog

1st January 2007

Abstract

Holiday travelling is stressful enough with the shopping, visiting relatives and finding someone to water your plants while you're away. The added hassle of juggling travel plans, itineraries and traffic maps can be downright traumatic.

Item

Gary Price Holiday travelling is stressful enough with the shopping, visiting relatives and finding someone to water your plants while you're away. The added hassle of juggling travel plans, itineraries and traffic maps can be downright traumatic.

Blessed is the mobile device, which can make organising your holiday plans less distressing, whether you're visiting the in-laws for the New Year or travelling for business. Having timetable info and check-in capabilities at your fingertips wherever you go, can make the journey that much easier.

Travel-related information on the mobile web is booming, as are all types of online research for such devices as BlackBerries, Treos and mobile phones. If you're not using the mobile web for some kind of research yet, it's likely that in the next 12 months you will be.

While the mobile web is burgeoning with information, below is a small representation of what's out there for those with a mobile-web browser, excluding services based on SMS (Short Message Service aka text messaging). Although brief, this list will still help you keep all your travel-related information at hand.

Planning your trip

One major area of growth on the mobile web is m-commerce or mobile commerce, allowing people to make purchases via their mobile devices. That's already available from companies like Amazon.com and Fandango (for movie tickets) that allow the user to enter a credit card and buy what they need. While most airlines and travel sites don't allow you to buy tickets (although in America, Amtrak does allow passengers to make train travel reservations online), many do offer timetable info, check-in capabilities and airport information.

Many airlines also offer tracking information on the mobile web. Some even offer notification services to alert you, family, friends, whomever, to delays, cancellations and other information.

Amtrak <http://www.amtrak.com/> will automatically recognise mobile browsers and let you use them to make reservations.
National Rail Enquiries <http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/> is now PDA-friendly for Pocket PCs, Sony Ericsson P900 and P901, Hewlett Packard Ipaq, Windows CE and BlackBerry.
Find flight information on British Airways <http://digbig.com/4qnad>, Cathay Pacific <http://wap.cathaypacific.com/>, Southwest Airlines <http://mobile.southwest.com/> and United Airlines <http://united.flightlookup.com/>
Orbitz <http://mobile.orbitz.com/> lets you access your personal itinerary (if you've booked via Orbitz) and is also a good place to get hotel info.
SeatGuru's <http://mobile.seatguru.com/> mobile version helps you select the best airplane seat.
eSkyGuide <http://www.flightlookup.com/> is a powerful database with timetable info for all major airlines.
Airport Delays (U.S.) <http://www.faa.gov/wireless/> lets you know what American airports are flying behind schedule.
FlightStats.com <http://mobile.flightstats.com/> is one of several sites for tracking aircraft as they fly in and out of U.S. airspace. Also useful is FlightChecker <http://www.rovenet.com/master/Flight/beginflight.htm>.
Car Rentals <http://mobile.carrentals.com/> gives access to many but not all major car rental companies.

Around town

As the mobile web grows in size, more and more newspapers are making all or some of their content available on the mobile web. Newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post already have mobile sites. They can be very useful, not only for local news but also for getting info about events and happenings around town.

NY Times Mobile <http://mobile.nytimes.com/>
Washington Post <http://mobile.washingtonpost.com/>
BBC News <http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/news/>
Wcities <http://pda.wcities.com/index.html> has event calendars, restaurant info, sports info and more for hundreds of cities around the world.

Transportation

Need help planning your route around a city using public transportation? This is one area that is likely to keep growing.

TeleNav <http://www.telenav.com/> offers a subscription service for many mobile devices so they can receive GPS services.
i-Metro <http://imetro.nanika.net/metro?o=h> download: <http://metro.nanika.net/index-en.html>) is an amazing tool. It offers public transport journey planners for many cities around the world. It's available on the mobile web or can be downloaded for offline use.
Transport for London <http://wap.tfl.gov.uk/> is a UK service that lets Londoners and their visitors plan their journeys on the Tube and rail.
Another type of service we will also see grow is real-time transport information like what's available from NextBus <http://www.nextbus.com/wireless/miniRegion.shtml>. Only a few cities are available but expect more from this and other services in the future. Here, GPS devices are placed on buses and trains, and you can learn precisely when the next bus or train will be at a specific location.
Traffic.com <http://mobi.traffic.com/> now has a mobile site and in New York City you can even view live traffic cameras: NY City Traffic Cameras <http://service.nyctmc.org/mobile/>.

Weather

If you're not sure if you should pack your mac or shorts while you're away, you can check the following for weather reports on the road.

BBC PDA Weather <http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/pda/> has UK weather and worldwide weather (as well as sports and news headlines).
Weather Underground <http://mobile.wunderground.com/> provides weather for many global cities.
For other cities, you can find a number of useful services including weather, sports scores, movie times and more from <http://wap.4info.net/>.

Phoning home

So you forgot an important file on your office computer, but you're on the road. Soonr <http://www.soonr.com/> is a free service that offers remote access to your desktop via most mobile devices and phones and allows you to access some or all (you decide) of the files located on it and run programs such as Skype. Of course, your remote computer needs to be left on to guarantee communication.

While Soonr and these other services are free (for the moment), accessing the mobile web when travelling is not. Many of these and other services are data-intensive. Be aware of how much data you can access on your plan. If your wallet goes into shock with a massive bill, you won't be able to afford to travel.

And, after all, who wants to miss the in-laws at Christmas?

Destination info and more

Of course, all of the popular search tools have mobile services that can help you access information just as you would on the regular web.

Most will even automatically convert pages that are not 'mobile friendly' into pages that are easier to read and download faster, sometimes called transcoders. Some work better than others. You can also go directly to transcoders yourself. Two we like are: