It’s a quarter to five in the morning, and I have a plane to catch in two hours. But why rush out the door if my flight is already delayed?

To check its status, I turn to my iPhone, tap on an application called FlightTrack and pull up my flight. It’s on time. Better get out of bed. At the airport, I check for Wi-Fi and update all my newspaper apps (NYTimes, WSJ, USA Today and so on) so I have something to read onboard. And when I arrive at my destination, I use the iPhone to pull up the Yelp app, and its built-in mapping feature, to find the most highly user-rated bars and restaurants.

Sure, I could have easily stumbled across that pizza place on my own and gotten by without the Cantonese catchphrases I downloaded in an app-buying frenzy. But as Apple’s iTunes Store has continued to grow with thousands of apps, I’ve come regularly to rely on the gadget as an integral part of my travel routine. (In fact, apps were part of a recent discussion about travel gadgets I had with the New York Times technology columnist David Pogue, which can be viewed on The Times’s Web site at video.nytimes.com.)

Yes, the iPhone has its glitches, which have all been called out in various tech reviews. And some of those can be particularly frustrating for on-the-go travelers, as when you want to tell your spouse that the plane is delayed another two hours and you can’t get service, or when your favorite app directs you to a restaurant that no longer exists.

With those caveats in mind, here is a list of apps that could come in handy on your next trip.

External Source – For the complete article click here

Source – New York Times

With Apple approaching 1 billion in downloaded apps, I thought it would be good time to take a look at the top 5 most popular free and paid travel apps on iTunes

PAID.
1. Flight Track - this application from Mobiata is similar to Web based applications such as Flight Stats, but produced by a small mobile app vendor. – Question why doesn’t Flight Track have the top position here?

2. Tipulator – Allows you to calculate the appropriate tip for service. Question: Isn’t that essentially a calculator?

3. Where The Locals Eat – was created by the dining guide company of the same name. The popularity of this paid app reinforces the demand for local dining advise

4. iFare Finder – is a Kayak like meta-search application. The interesting aspect of iFare Finder is that it is only a mobile app. I could not even find a Website for RIV Creations the creator of iFare Finder, only a blog. Having helped a client last year create a mega-search engine, simple screen scraping will not work as a long term solution. Time will tell the quality of the engine behind iFare Finder.

5. Zagat to Go – At last a familiar brand name!

FREE
1. Google Earth – shows how Google is already dominating the mobile space

2. Urbanspoon – a slot machine that allows the user to chose a type of restaurant randomly

3. YELP – the UGC local restaurant and services

4. WiFi Finder – locate free and paid Wi-Fi networks

5. Choice Hotels Locator – At last a familiar travel brand!

So what does this all mean? Though brands such as Kayak, Hotels.com and Disney do appear in the top 20, a vast number of travel brands are missing. Now multiply this by 1000 and you can start to see how the explosion of app stores from Google, RIM Blackberry, T-Mobile and Nokia will further lead to missed branding opportunities unless the travel industry major players recognize that mobile downloads are here to stay and that they need to be part of every travel company’s strategy.