I am mere days away from my nearly annual trek to Florida to visit the relations, and I am geeking out on my travel tech. Mind you, it’s no TARDIS, but this year will mark a huge change in my travel organization and preparation.
To break it down:
- TripIt/Trip Deck – I have been repeatedly accused of being a pusher of TripIt, but if. You travel often this site will change your life. You register either straight through the site or using Facebook Connect or Google Apps. Once in you simply forward any reservation email, be it airfare, hotel, or rental car, and TripIt automatically parses the email for all the details and builds out your itinerary. Pretty brilliant if you ask me. Trip Deck is an iPhone app that syncs with TripIt and then allows you to carry all your trip information with you up to date. It tracks flight arrivals and will send a notification if any thing changes. A recent addition allows you to see a map view of all y our destinations, important when you will be moving across the entirety of Florida in two weeks.
- Tethering – yes my iPhone is jail broken. Yes, I did it with an unlimited data plan before AT&T screwed us, but it is what it is. I use an app called MyWi and it is amazing. It turn my iPhone into a MiFi and creates a wifi hot spot where ever I go. Yes, AT&T will be supporting tethering in iOS 4 but not over Wifi, and not to the iPad. So, I’m not changing this workflow at all.
- The iPad – again, yes I bought an iPad. The plan is to not take my laptop on this trip, and see how far the iPad can take me. For admin, and content consumption, the iPad is dead on. This post was written on an iPad (edited on my laptop, but that was more for the differences in the WordPress app to the web editor).
I’m hoping to follow this up once the trip is complete.