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.
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.
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.
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:
Gary Price is the founder and chief editor and compiler of ResourceShelf <http://www.resourceshelf.com/>. This daily electronic newsletter is where he and the ResourceShelf team post news and other new resources of interest to the online researcher. He is also the founder of, and a contributor to, DocuTicker <http://www.docuticker.com/>, another daily update with direct links to a variety of new reports from government agencies, think tanks, NGOs, universities and other groups. Gary Price is also a librarian and the Director of Online Information Resources at Ask.com.
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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.
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