Thanks to the convenience of travel apps, you can do anything from send a postcard to transform photos into portrait quality creations—all from the convenience of your smartphone. Here are a few of our favorite smartphone travel apps.
Six smartphone travel apps
1. Keep up to date on the exact status of your flight using App in the Air. Just enter your flight information and find out the terminal, gate number, time of check-in and even the weather of your destination. App in the Air will even notify you of last-minute gate changes. If you’d rather not get continuous updates, just turn the notification off.
2. Use Artista Impresso to design some creative variations of the pictures you take. This app allows you to place one of your pictures on a “canvas” and add brush strokes. Simple snapshots are transformed into professional-looking portraits. I took the featured picture at the top of this page of one of our hotels in Guatemala and gave it two different looks:
3. Use Postagram to create a real postcard sent directly from your phone to a friend’s mailbox. Simply choose a picture from your phone, Facebook, Instagram, etc., add a simple message and address, then send. Postagram can pull in all your contacts from your smartphone, so there’s no need to type in the address. Postcards delivered within the United States cost around 99 cents. Overseas delivery can run upwards of $1.99.
4. If you want to avoid the mental math involved in converting currency, check out XE Currency. Whether you need to convert dollars to Thai bahts or Guatemalan quetzales to euros, XE does all the calculating for you. Place your favorite currencies at the top of the screen so they’re open and available at any time.
5. Thanks to Finder by JiWire you can find wi-fi locations all over the world. Enter the address or city where you’ll be on vacation and JiWire can filter the available hotspots by free or paid or by venue e.g. a coffee shop or a hotel.
6. 1Password is a secure way to manage all your passwords. Instead of carrying around a password notebook (or worse, carrying them around in your head), this app keeps passwords in a single place that’s secure and portable and allows you access to them with one password.
One final note before you enjoy your new smartphone travel apps: Make sure to check whether the app is self-contained or whether internet access is required while in use. You don’t want to dampen your perfect overseas Niteo vacation with stiff roaming charges.
