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One iPhone Travel App To (Almost) Rule Them All

One iPhone Travel App To (Almost) Rule Them All

Back in the old days, before you kids got all these newfangled Robots and Compact Discs and Moving Pictures, traveling was a genuine challenge. You trekked to the airport for miles through the snow - uphill, mind you - wondering all the while if they would have an airplane that could take you somewhere close to where you wanted to go.

“Somewhere close,” by the by, was good enough. You were going to get lost once you got there anyway. So no reason to be picky.

Now travelers have this iPhone thing, which is basically like cheating. There are applications that track flights, map out attractions, and manage everything in between. We know because every day we get inundated by dozens of “Top 5 iPhone Travel Apps” posts. The current Google count for that search: 3,310,000. By the way, have you seen our own Five Best iPhone Apps for Your Next Trip?

Instead of all that nonsense, how about just using a single travel app? Or, failing that, a single app and just one small friend so it doesn’t get lonely?

The big iPhone buzz from the last few days has been all about the free app that Web 2.0 darling TripIt just published. TripIt takes every aspect of your itinerary - flights, hotels, cars, attractions, etc - and organizes them into something approaching coherence.

Their app takes the resources that TripIt normally makes available - phone numbers, maps, weather reports - and links them to the iPhone. In addition to being pretty awesome on its own, it makes a lot of other unitasking travel apps redundant. Which won’t stop the Top 5 lists, but still.

While TripIt is excellent about telling you where you are going, it’s pretty much useless for telling you where you should be going. For that you might want to avail yourself of GeoNova Publishing’s Discover Guide Map. There are maps for ten major US cities, including New York, DC, and Vegas. The app locates you, maps out all the nearby landmarks and attractions, and even hotlinks them to web resources. See? Cheating.

[Photo: leo.prie.to / Flickr]

[Thanks: http://www.jaunted.com/]

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