WorldMate Live has an ingenious way of getting your travel information into their application. As your travel confirmations arrive by e-mail, you simply forward them to a WorldMate Live e-mail address. Their
server pulls out all the relevant information and puts it into your travel itinerary that then gets pushed back to
your phone. I was highly dubious of this feature at first, but after trying it, I was quite impressed—it pulled
every last bit of information about my flights, including the confirmation number. Everything I'd have spent
several minutes entering into a series of Microsoft Office Outlook appointments was automatically entered for
me—all by simply forwarding an e-mail. Impressive!
With the Gold version, you can also access a wealth of real-time information. For instance, up to 48 hours
before your flight, you can check the flight status, helping to ensure you don't head to the airport only to find
that the flight is running late. You can also get information, such as the gate number the flight is leaving from,
and in the case of a cancelled flight, you can look up alternate flights. And if you're wondering if your flight
might be cancelled due to weather, the Gold version can show you animated satellite weather maps. Although
the maps are quite small—and you can’t zoom in on the images—it’s still great information to have at your
fingertips.
WorldMate Live offers a lot to the frequent traveler, and having real-time flight information is easily worth $99 to the right type of person, but the application itself could use some polishing. It's not very finger-friendly,
which means it's not going to be easy to use one-handed as you're going through the airport. I also found it
slow to use—switching from one function to the next was sluggish, and more than once I watched as it
refreshed the screen one piece at a time. I was also surprised to see that it didn't insert the travel items into
the Office Outlook Mobile calendar—you wouldn't want to accidentally book a meeting for the same time as you're
supposed to be at the airport. Maybe we’ll see that in the next version. Those small issues aside, if you travel
regularly, you'll want to download the free version and check out the seven-day trial of the Gold version to see if you
like it.