By Felix Lee
Going on a long awaited overseas holiday or just a weekend getaway across the ditch? Bigpipe have put together the top 10 apps to help you make the most of your trip. Best of all, they’re all free!
Google+ is the best way to handle your holiday snaps. It will automatically backup them up to your Google account and keep them safe. Later, you can do all kinds of Google magic with them such as; brighten, sharpen and even create animations out from them. Your friends will think you took a DSLR camera on your trip, when it fact it’s just your smartphone with some snazzy touchups. See demo here.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, an immersive 360° panorama must be worth a million. Using Google Camera you can capture all the beauty on your trip with its Photo Sphere mode. Using this feature, your photos are not just your regular photo anymore. Capturing a 360° picture from where you stand, it allows you to relive that moment again and again; it’s the next best thing to going back there again.
Mirror Lake, Yosemite National Park, California, USA
Want to have a jam-packed itinerary? Tripomatic can help! You can see where all the famous attractions are in any city are and choose which ones are of interested to you. It will even suggest how long to spend at each location and tell you the distance between each attraction. Once you have planned your trip on the website, you can view your itinerary with the user friendly app.
When booking a trip, your inbox will be chock-a-block with confirmation emails, hotel bookings, car rental invoices and plane tickets etc. It can be a handful to try to keep everything organised. TripIt will automatically gather your travel booking emails and put them into one easy to use list. Once you reach your destination, just pull out your phone and you have all your confirmation emails and reference numbers at your finger tips. Easy.
Interested in those off the beating track places when you’re away? Want to find those hidden gems tourists often miss? Then Field Trip is the app for you. It runs as a background app which will notify you when you’re near a place of interest. Using your current location, Field Trip uses Google to locate real time events to give users historical facts about the area they’re in at any given time. It’s like your personal tour guide!
Citymapper is like your local friend who knows everything about the public transport options in a city. It shows you all transport options and helps you choose which is best suited to you. Listing realtime departure times, costs and the route it will take, there’s no more need to queue up at those information desks to ask “which platform” through a partition.
Google Now will show you the weather, tell you how long it will take you to get to work, and remind you when your favourite TV shows are out. It’s even more useful when you’re away from home. It will help you convert currency, translate foreign languages, show you attractions and photo spots and keep track of your hotel bookings. It will even remind you when it’s time to leave for the airport taking into account traffic and possible delays. You can literally replace half a dozen apps with this one.
Everyone’s favourite travel site, now in app form! Tripadvisor is handy for looking up reviews while you’re on the go. Simple to follow star ratings, reviews and price comparisons catering for everyones taste buds and budget preferences. With over 150 million reviews, you’re bound to find anything that tickles your fancy when traveling using this app.
Don’t know where to eat? Yelp to the rescue! This app will help feed your appetite with listings of everything food. If a restaurant or eatery has a high rating on Yelp, then it’s generally good. With its easy to follow categories, star ratings and reviews, Yelp is a foodies best friend when on holidays. It also has each listings menu, opening times and information such as; Wi-Fi, attire, ambience, indoor/outdoor seating, alcohol and payment types.
Everywiki is a reader for wikis. You can use it to look up Wikivoyage and get an idea about the place you’re going, you can also use it to check Wikipedia to understand more about the things you encounter on your trip, or read Wiktionary to learn the local lingo. You can also save articles for offline use. With a 4.5 out of 5 star rating, Everywiki has gained a solid user demographic.
Google Maps is useful at home. It’s even more useful when you’re abroad. Apart from the standard where-am-I and how-to-go-where-I-want-to-go functions, it also has reviews of establishments and recommendations on places you might want to go. It also gives you those handy live traffic updates using GPS congestion.
Bigpipe are certainly going to download some of these for our next adventure. What’s your favourite travel app? Tell us in the comments below.
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