Forbes India Global Business Traveller's Guide: Give your smartphone a bit of a boost
BLACKBERRY APPS
BeWeather (Free)
Instant current weather conditions, detailed 7-day and 24-hour forecasts for locations worldwide. You can keep up to 10 locations at the same time. Gives temperature, wind, pressure, dew point and humidity. You can also track your location via GPS/cell. Switch to nearby weather stations, and add custom web cams and other media links (weather radio, video, HTML etc) to any location.
Business Card Reader ($9.99)
Import contact information painlessly from business cards directly to your BlackBerry contacts by taking a photo of a business card. It ‘reads’ the picture and enters the data into appropriate fields of the BlackBerry address book. It recognises English, French, Italian, German and Spanish business cards and supports the Tour, Curve 8900, Storm, Storm 2 and Bold 9700.
Kayak Travel Search (Free)
This connects to kayak.com, a travel search engine that compares hundreds of travel sites at one go. You can find airfares and hotel prices immediately for free, and book online (it also shows hotels that don’t have online booking), or just press a button and your ’Berry will call them up. Features include searches for flights, hotels and car rentals with various filters. It allows you to track your flight’s status. In addition, there’s an airlines phone directory, Kayak Buzz (which gives you price trends) and free itinerary management.
iPHONE APPS
(This story appears in the 21 May, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)