My Top 10 Favorite Travel Technologies

In this day and age of increasingly pervasive Internet connectivity (I was just using Gtalk to chat with my Mom, who was at the Singapore airport waiting for a connecting flight to Burma!), travel technologies have become more and more critical to ensuring a good travel experience (or, at least, making your travel experience a little more bearable!).

My ten favorite travel technologies are as follows:

1. ua2go.com - United Airlines' very fast, mobile-optimized site for checking flight status, availability, and even mileage plus account status. Also works great from a regular web browser.
2. seatguru.com - Contains seat maps for virtually every type of airplane used by every major carrier in the world. Works from both a regular browser as well as wireless browsers. Allows you to check the seat configuration for the airplanes you're going to be traveling on, so that you can make the best seat choice available. SeatGuru also has invaluable information about some seats that you might think are really good ones--for instance, certain bulkhead seats do not have room to store carryon bags, and they are also close to the lavatories!
3. fly.faa.gov - Great site that contains incredibly useful information, such as which airports are experiencing delays (and why)--I've used this site from the airplane when we've been advised that there will be a delay (and that it's OK to use mobile phones); you can find out information that the pilots either don't have, or won't share with the passengers! If you are using a mobile device, there is also a text-only version at fly.faa.gov/flyfaa/plaintext.html
4. accuweather.com - Nice weather site with up-to-date forecasts for just about anywhere. As a big plus, they also have a mobile-optimized site at http://wap.wirelessaccuweather.com
5. tripit.com - Have you ever wondered if any of your fellow road warriors might happen to be in the same city as you, at the same time? TripIt combines a very cool personal itinerary service with the ability to hook up to your friends' TripIt accounts (you can't see others' itineraries, just what city they are in)--a social network for travelers. When you view your various itineraries in the service, it automatically displays friends that will be close by at the same time. The service also has a wonderful itinerary parsing technology that allows you to forward your itinerary to plans@tripit.com , and the service automatically reads the itinerary and creates an online TripIt itinerary. I'm impressed--the service can even read the PDF itinerary that American Express Travel sends me, and it's remarkably accurate. TripIt also recently announced "closeness alerts", which automatically notify you if a friend will be close by.
   
6. schmap.com - online and offline travel guides that are updated on a regular basis. The guides contain the usual combination of restaurant and hotel reviews, tourist attractions, and the like, but they also contain a lot of very cool photographs, most of which were taken by actual tourists. In addition to the online version, you can download the entire guide to your PC for use when you don't have connectivity.
7. iPass - awesome service that acts as a broker between many different WiFi providers, including T-Mobile, Boingo, AT&T, etc. My company provided me with an iPass account (and an applet loaded on our laptops) that allows me to utilize over 89,000 paid WiFi hotspots all over the world--at no cost to me. The iPass applet even automatically launches my corporate VPN, ensuring that my connection is secure. Awesome!
   
8. Blackberry 8100 Bluetooth - the ability to wirelessly connect my laptop to my Blackberry 8100 (also known as the Pearl), is incredibly useful. In instances where I do not have access to a WiFi hotspot, I can use my Pearl as a wireless modem, and the connection between my laptop and my Pearl is also wireless. While the speed on the T-Mobile EDGE network isn't stellar (usually around 56 kbps), it's better than nothing! Apparently other carriers, such as Verizon, have much faster data rates--something to consider when your phone contract is up for renewal. There is a good HOWTO guide on hooking up PCs and Blackberries at on the Blackberry Forums site.
9. Garmin StreetPilot GPS - my Garmin c300 GPS, which is a palm-sized device that I can take anywhere, has become an irreplaceable part of my travel weaponry. Even though my unit is one of the least expensive on the market, it does a wonderful job of figuring out where in the world I am and guiding me to my destination as quickly as possible. It also has tens of thousands of points of interest (POIs) that allow me to quickly find the closest gasoline, hospital, or Starbucks! You can even download custom POI lists from the Internet and then upload them to the GPS--for example, a list of safety cameras in the UK as well as red-light cameras in the US will automatically warn you when one is in the vicinity. Well worth the investment for anyone that travels much at all. The only downside: you become very dependent on the device, and hence you don't learn where you are driving--be sure you still have backup analog maps just in case your GPS quits working!
10. Google Earth - an amazing application, originally created by a company called Keyhole and acquired by Google, allows you to play virtual tourst all over the planet. In addition to the satellite and map views that we've all become acqainted with, Google Earth also incorporates a rich set of location information from many different sources. The product also allows you to "fly" around the planet very quickly, and certain areas even have street-level views. I use Google Earth extensively when I'm planning a trip to a new location--it's invaluable to be able to get a general idea of what the area looks like before you go there.
    

This is just a small sampling of the travel tools I have accumulated over the years--I'll publish more on this subject in the future.