Using your iPhone on the road isn’t the same as at home. You certainly want to disable data roaming (for your home SIM card) as it is usually ridiculously expensive – O2 Germany for example charges more than 12 Euro per MB (yes the amount of a few emails, this is not a typo) if you travel outside Europe. So biggest problem if you travel with an iPhone is that you will rarely be able to use mobile data. We only bought local prepaid SIMs with mobile data packages in a few countries (where it was either really cheap or really necessary). Otherwise you will have to work with the occasional wifi connection and have apps that download all necessary data there and store whatever data you produce inbetween to upload when you get connectivity next time.
These are my Top 10 iPhone Travel Apps after 18 months on the road, in order of importance:
1. Travel pocket, US$1.99. Keep track of your cash expenses and get a quick view of daily average spend or total spend. It takes time stamps and GPS points for every expense and you can categorize them (food, drinks, transport, entertainment, clothes, etc) and have the app email you a CSV file in Excel format for some interesting stats. We tracked our spendings throughout the whole journey with this and prepare some stats to post here on the blog soon.
2. Wiki offline, US$9.99. The best resource by far while somewhere on the road. You can read up about the local country, city, history, culture, food or anything else about the place you are currently at that was captured by the wikipedia community. It often replaced a guide book for us.
3. iTravel free, free. At first I was put off by its instability (it breaks down if you work it too fast) but it is the most reasonable free app that lets you download wikitravel pages. A shame that the editing of wiki pages doesn’t work – so the sometimes poor content of wikitravel doesn’t improve faster.
4. Converter+, free. A genius free app for currency conversion, that works offline as well but automatically updates exchange rates whenever you use it while the phone has internet connectivity. Can also be used to convert different length, temperature, weight units etc.
5. Factbook, US$0.99. An app that stores the data of the CIA World Fact Book on your phone… everything from the political situation to demographics, economic stats, geography, etc for all countries around the globe. It gives you a good first intro to a new country.
6. OpenMaps, free. Theoretically a great way to store maps on your phone and locate you even without internet connectivity (where Google maps doesn’t work). However, they have a limit on download volumes, after which they block your device.
7. Good Reader, US$4.99. Great app to read and store PDFs, works nicely with a full set of Lonely Planet PDF files…
8. PortfolioToGo Mini, (this might be down now). For a cache of your flickr photos. The good thing is it syncs directly with flickr – we didn’t carry the computer/itunes that is linked to our iPhone, so we couldnt update the apple photos app.
9. Tripwolf, free. Has some good travel trips depending on the city and country you are in and the latest version has offline maps too.
10. Foursquare, free. Good to explore food or accommodation locations in places with a solid local foursquare community. Good way of letting friends & family know where you hang out these days.
Here are a few other travel apps and locally useful apps that we were using on the road:
– Fotopedia Heritage, free. Fantastic travel inspiration with nice photos of all UNESCO sites around the world, a Google maps mashup to see which ones are in your area, etc.
– Offline Reader, free. Good little tool to store any general website on your phone, so you can doublecheck the address of that hostel that you had looked up.
– Data Man, US$0.99. Always monitor your mobile data usage – otherwise the pay as you go credit of your local SIM card can be gone within hours.
– Smartr contacts, free. A nice app to add email and social media correspondents to your contacts and to store email addresses of your facebook friends offline (so you can prepare emails without having connectivity).
– Hurricane, US$2.99. This is a good guide about potential storms heading your way, especially while traveling in East Asia or the Caribbean. We came through a few typhoons and at least you want to know before they hit you.
– Welly Walks, free. Local app, nice tours around Wellington, NZ.
– Grand Palace, US$2.99. Local app, interactive guide around the Grand Palace, Bangkok, TH.
