Tuesday 18 February 2014

Travelling with Android: City Apps

You need to look at a lot of things while you are on a tour- catch a bus, navigate while trekking, find nearby restaurants, go to the nearest ATM and so on. Let us see how the Android world will come to our assistance while you are on the road.

In this age of augmented reality gadgets and apps, we will see a transformation in the way we move about in our cities and towns. You can expect a lot in augmented reality navigation with wearable devices like Galaxy Watch, Google Glass or Pebble and apps like Layar, Wikitude or Google Goggles.

Google Maps is Enough, Right?

Well I never have used anything other than Google Maps while traveling just because it is a headache to keep different useful apps ready while I go out of town.Google Maps may not be the one for your purpose here as it just gives a whole lot of information and expects us to search for it.

What you need while traveling is to have in hand the information that you need without having to dig for a needle in a haystack. This is exactly what City apps brings to the table.


OK, What do You have for Me?

I had a look at the '10 best apps for traveling abroad' listed by Mashable which will give me some idea- listed there is the usual paraphernalia of apps. And then I poked around the Android ecosystem a bit experimenting with some of those apps.

Here is what I did not find useful. I checked out an app for Indian cities- City Guide and it did not even work in the Sony Xperia Mini Pro Gingerbread and Jelly Bean Samsung Galaxy Grand that I tested. There are some other travels apps like TripAdvisor- but they are available for only a handful of cities- only Mumbai and Delhi in India!

What Can I Actually Use?

AroundMe is the most useful app that you can find here- it will always come to your rescue when you have to find a nearby ATM, restaurants, movie thearters, gas stations and what not. Its good to have this app instead of separate apps for doing them. You can have this app if you don't have nothing else other that Google Maps!

If you are traveling in a foreign country, you might find iTranslate very useful for speech-to-text conversion (and vice-versa too) while talking to a native, apart from for translating languages while reading SMS or sending emails.

HeyWire is a messaging app much like Whatsapp and Skype or even like Viber and Tango, the difference being you can message to any number in the world! You will be given a US number and you can message for free back to any number from almost anywhere in the world, whether they are using HeyWire or not. (Sending message costs money but HeyWire get the revenue from ads placed int the app) You can post Tweets, share songs and pictures; and it is a meme generator too! But sadly in India, HeyWire users can message to HeyWire users only. So Whatsapp, Tango or Viber should suffice for now.

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