Be an organized trip-taker with Spb Traveler |
| | Spb Traveler, from Spb Software House, is software designed for phones with Windows Mobile Professional and keeps track of everything you need for a trip: flight information, currency conversion, time zone changes, and a lot more. It's the latest entry in a category of applications that can be best described as “A Business Traveler's Best Friend.” They are typically applications used by those that travel frequently, and while most do not include foreign language translation components, software of this type is tremendously helpful for anyone dealing with different time zones, airplane flights, currencies, and unit conversions.
Installing Spb Traveler was a snap — it takes up 5.03 MB of storage space on your Windows Mobile device, so depending on the amount of storage space you have free, you may want to install it on a memory card. After installation, there's a Today screen plug-in that appears and helpfully displays Tap here to run Spb Traveler. After tapping it, the software starts and you are immediately prompted to select a city — everything about Spb Traveler is based on where you are now, and where you are going to be going. |
|
 Figure 1. Picking my first city in Spb Traveler |  Figure 2. My four configured cities, with the map active |
Typing in the first three letters of the city you're in is enough for Spb Traveler to quickly generate a list. I typed in "sea" looking for Seattle (the city I travel to most frequently), and was shown everything from Seabrook in Texas, to Seaford in Great Britain, so the list is quite comprehensive. You can also add cities by country, with options for state-level or ZIP-code-level searches, or by airport. Seattle was on the list when I searched by name (Figure 1), so I tapped it and the software went back to the Home screen of Spb Traveler. The cities you've added appear in a list, and you can fit four cities in the screen at a time at standard size without having to scroll. The idea here is that these cities are your favorite cities, but you can add more at any time.
There are different views — ways of displaying the cities — including wide, narrow, two-column, and one-line. You can fit more or fewer cities on the screen without scrolling, and each view differs in terms of how much time and weather information it displays. There is also an option to add a map with or without a night overlay. Next, I added Calgary (my hometown) and two cities I may be travelling to later this year: Paris and Amsterdam. Figure 2 shows what Spb Traveler looks like after my selection of cities, the layout view, and the map turned on (with night view). |
|
 Figure 3. The Spb Traveler Today screen plug-in |  Figure 4: The detailed weather view. |
The Today screen plug-in (Figure 3) is probably the most frequent way you'll interact with the information that Spb Traveler provides because it's always right there when you turn on your device. Depending on how you have it configured, it will convey the time, date, and weather information for each of the cities you've entered. The weather in Seattle usually involves rain, however with a quick tap I can see that later in the week it will be cool and cloudy, but not rainy. Detailed weather is helpful when planning for places you haven't been — switching to the Amsterdam tab, and tapping anywhere on the weather, I'm presented a pop-up window with detailed daily weather information (Figure 4). Looks like I'd better bring a water-resistant jacket if I were going to be travelling to Amsterdam next week!
On the Home screen of Spb Traveler, there are some basic configuration options when you tap Menu and then tap Options: five different Home-screen plug-in views (Normal, Wide, Narrow, Multi-Line, and Detailed), where the time is positioned on the Home screen, and whether you want to display one or multiple cities on the Today screen. There are also options for what type of units you want displayed for temperature (Fahrenheit or Celsius), speed (km/h, mph, m/s or knots), and even for pressure (mBar, mmHg). You can control how weather and currency updates are done (manual update or auto-update every few hours), and identify your home currency. International roaming data prices are horribly expensive, so before I travel next I'll set this to update manually. |
|
Find your way around the functions in the program by tapping the Tools menu. Spb Traveler is has several tools, with each tool serving a particular function. When you install Spb Traveler, it creates a folder called Spb Traveler Tools that contains six different shortcuts to the tools: Trip Assistant, Currency Converter, Unit Converter, Meeting Planner, Clothing Sizes, Time Converter, Phrase Book, and Tip Calculator. Let's walk through some of these with examples of how you can use them. |
| Your personal trip assistant | Use the Trip Assistant tool to enter your flight information. When you first start it up, it will prompt you to use the menu to add a flight, but you actually need to tap Options, and then tap Add Flight. You're presented with a blank template designed for flight information: your flight number, the city you're flying from, the city you're flying to, the departure and arrival dates/times, along with the reminder time (anywhere from 15 minutes to 3 hours before your flight leaves), the terminal/gate reference, a booking/ticket number, and even your seat number.
What I found particularly handy when I was entering the information for my imaginary flight to Amsterdam is that when I tapped on the From field to type in the city, the Trip Assistant tool offered a drop-down menu with my favorite cities already there as options (with the ability to pick from any city). This makes entering the flight information a snap — even for multi-leg journeys — and you end up with a great summary of all your flight information (Figure 6). You also have the Notes field for adding anything extra, such as the meal you requested on the flight or special instructions.
When you've entered your flight information the Trip Assistant tool will display the current time in your home city, and give you a departure count-down in days or hours. It also shows your departure and arrival times, along with your total time in the air factoring in time zone changes. Seeing my total time in the air helps me plan what sorts of things I want to pack in my carry-on bag, such an extended battery for my laptop if the flight doesn't have power plugs. |
|
 Figure 6. The summary of your individual flight information |  Figure 7. All of your flight information in one place |
What Spb Traveler lacks in the flight department is any sort of flight information updates such as what WorldMate® offers. This means that if your flight is delayed or cancelled, you have no way of knowing until you get to the airport or check independently. I also noticed that if you look at the appointment it creates in the Outlook Mobile calendar, it has the basic information in the subject line of the appointment (“Northwest 1542 Calgary to Amsterdam”), but all the other information is missing unless you go back and look at the appointment in Spb Traveler. I'd prefer to see that information in the Notes field at the very least. Also, there's no way to invite an attendee to a flight appointment—when I travel, my wife likes having my flight information in her calendar so she knows when I'm in the air. |
| How much is that in… | Jumping back into the other tools that Spb Traveler offers, next we have the Currency Converter (Figure 8). As the name implies, you can convert up to four different currencies simultaneously. Unfortunately, it's not smart enough to display the currencies of the cities you've added to your favorites, but it's easy enough to change the currency to get what you need. I know I'd find this personally very useful while travelling—I tend not to be very skilled at doing currency conversions in my head, so being able to calculate that the leather jacket I'm looking at for 250 Euros really costs US $346 helps keep things in perspective. I wish I'd had this when I was in Thailand in 2006—their currency was a bit over 32 to 1, so it made calculations complex. And hey, it's always good to know that one U.S. dollar is worth 15,857 Vietnamese dong—you'll be the go-to guy at any party where the topic of currency comes up. |
|
Units of measure | If I'm bad at currency conversions, I'm even worse at converting temperature or weight in my head. Spb Traveler includes a handy unit converter (Figure 9) that will convert any unit of measurement to almost anything else: conversion types supported are length, temperature, area, speed, weight, volume, and pressure. Who knew I weighed 15 stone, or that 110 KM/h is just over 100 feet per second? |
|
Other features | Other modules include Meeting Planner (for selecting conference call times based on time zones and it also creates calendar appointments), Clothing Sizes (for figuring out what size of Birkenstocks to buy for my wife), Time Converter (for simple time zone calculations), a Phrase Book (with some basic phrases in most European languages), and a Tip Calculator (for figuring out how to split the bill when paying for your 186 Euro meal with a 15 percent tip). It would be useful if the Tip Calculator included some sort of cultural database with tipping norms—I remember my friends being surprised when I put a tip on the table while in Rome; I didn't realize it wasn't considered normal behavior to tip. There is a cultural database of sorts in Spb Traveler—it's found under the Game module and involves simple trivia questions about the capital cities and flags of countries around the world. I used to think I had a decent grasp of geography, until this game proved otherwise—who knew that the city of Farghona was in Uzbekistan? The Game module is a nice diversion for any traveler who enjoys learning about geography.
Spb Traveler is a feature-rich application that anyone who travels frequently will enjoy. It can be purchased for U.S.$29.95 and there's a fully-functional 15-day trial available for download from the Spb Software House Web site. |
|
|
|  | |