Wap Review

Hotel and Restaurant listing by price, location cuisine etc. for popular travel destinations around the world. While there are no reviews - just name, address, phone and fax the establishments are the same ones that are recommended in the well regarded Fodors travel guidebooks.

DOPPLER Mobile (m.dopplr.com) The social network for frequent travelers now has a mobile site. Doppler lets you share your itineraries with friends and shows you when you and your friends are in or near the same city.

I've been playing with Tripit.com lately, it's a startup with a really clever but simple approach to travel planning. You don't even have to register, just forward the confirmation e-mails that you get from airlines, car rental agencies, Orbitz, Travelocity, Amtrak, Eurostar and hundreds of other travel companies and websites to plans@trippit.com. Tripit parses the e-mails, including attached PDFs, and builds an itinerary for you, complete with historical temperatures, maps, and links to information about your destinations from Wikipedia and other sites.

Tripit's mobile version is pretty limited. It gives you read-only access to your itineraries, displays "Closeness Alerts" and lets you share trips by email. That's better than nothing, but I'd really like to see Tripit flesh out the mobile features. Travel is by definition a mobile activity, when I travel my phone is my PC. Travel plans change, even in the middle of a trip, but none of the Tripit features that are usable with a phone (feeds, iCalendar integration, "Tripit To Me", mobile web site) let you plan or edit trips. I tried using the full Tripit.com site in Nokia's WebKit, Opera Mobile 8.65 and Opera Mini 4.1 and I was able to view the site and enter some trip details, critical tasks including adding flights were impossible.

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Just Go Guides, a new service from ApiApi, Lda offers a mobile based alternative to traditional paper or electronic travel guidebooks in the form of a mobile web based travel guide.

The site, which covers Mexican and Central and South American destinations, contains background information for each country and region including sections on history, weather, customs, currency and transportation. The core content of the site consists of detailed city by city listings of hotels, restaurants and attractions. Listings include a picture, description, address, click to call phone number and user ratings. You can even book hotels and make restaurant reservations by texting a formatted message to Just Go's UK number.

JustGo.mobi redirects to a URL (http://justgoguides.com/iphone/1/index.shtml) that suggests that it's an iPhone site. But non-iPhones aren't blocked and there isn't any iPhone specific code on the site. However, the site uses image maps for selecting the regions within a country. Unfortunately, the majority of mobile browsers do not support image maps. iPhone Safari does, as do the browsers on most touchscreen phones. And thanks to their virtual mouse cursors, Opera Mini (in desktop mode only) and S60WebKit work very well with the image maps, even on non-touch screen phones. But on phones without image map support, there is no way to get past the region selection screen and into the core content of the site.

Just Go's mobile web site is a good resource for anyone traveling in the countries it covers, provided your phone's browser supports image maps.

This site has nothing but travel videos, dozens of them covering all parts of the world. The videos are downloadable 176x144 .3gp files.

Conde Nast Traveler magazine's Concierge.com now has a mobile version. Aimed primarily at the luxury traveler, Concierge has weather, hotel, restaurant, event and attraction listings for travel destinations around the world. There are also free travel photography mobile wallpapers for download. A special Gold List section, features the best, cost is no object hotels and resorts as chosen by Conde Nast Traveler readers.

A handy site for checking rental car rates and making reservations. Accepts a zip code or airport code and date range and returns a list of rentals with prices from multiple agencies. It seems to be for North America only. The results pages are on the large side (20+KB) for mobiles.

This site run by the Candian Government which tells you the average wait at each USA - Canada border crossing.

An English language i-Mode portal with dozens of links to English i-mode sites in Japan. Useful to English speaking visitors to Japan, Shinkansen has links to train and bus schedules, restaurant guides, entertainment calendar, a Starbucks locator language tools and more. i-Mode, because it is mostly a subset of HTML will display reasonably well in IE, Firefox and Opera as well as most WAP2 browsers. You won't see the emoji (small icons that are resident in i-Mode browsers), instead you will get a question mark, little box or nothing at all where the emoji should appear. The latter is a problem as most links in i-Mode are on just the emoji not the text following it. The only browser that I've seen that strips emoji completely - thus removing the links is the Access Netfront browser used on some Sprint Sanyo handsets. Fortunately, most English i-Mode sites make very limited use of emoji.

London based travel reservation site. Book flights, hotels and vacation packages and find London restaurants.

7-Sept-2008 Site is up but only displays, "We're currently renovating our mobile offering so that it is up to the standard that you would expect from lastminute.com"

Common phrases in common languages" Thyng is a minimalist phasebook offering translations of "Thank you", "Hello", "Yes", "No" and "Goodbye" in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian.

A mobile travel portal with links to airline, hotel and other travel sites.

"Please Let it Be Available" worldwide budget travel search. Search for and book a variety of services including hostel and hotel rooms, car rental, taxis, restaurants and adventure travel.