Roaming data plans are just horrible. Also, paid WiFi access spots are overly expensive, and a pain to set up on an iPhone. This is why the apps "Kayak" and "Gate Guru" seem so much like a huge wasted opportunity.
My greatest annoyance with airports, especially during transfers, is how easy it is to potentially get lost, or sometimes going in the wrong direction when you have only a few minutes to catch the next plane. So of course I would love to be able to use the Gate Guru app to have a quick access to airport maps from all around the world. Combined with Kayak, with its integration with many travel services and information, and those would be amazing to use. If you have data access.
In the end, I end up preferring travel guides packaged as ebooks, essentially electronic forms of those convenient paperback guides. In that case, using e-book readers like the Kindle, with their long multi-days battery life, are useful when you won't be able to recharge your devices at all for days. I consider offline access essential when traveling, and as such the iPhone isn't of much use, while an iPad or Kindle pre-loaded with lots of offline travel e-books and PDF maps work great.
Published on August 29, 2012 at 21:21 EDT
Older post: Converting XPS to PDF of Mac
Newer post: The Java Anti-Update