Technology blogger Brad Girtz runs down his favourite travel apps of the year...
With New Years fast approaching, and travellers making holiday plans, many people will be looking to smart phones to make their travel plans easier.
There are plenty of great travel applications out there to help tech savvy globe trotters. They do everything from tracking flights to translating foreign languages.
While many of them are very useful, five in particular stood out in 2010.
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This iPhone app translates languages using the phone's camera.
Users simply point the camera at the text they want translated and the translation appears on the screen. While the app is not totally refined and cannot yet decipher handwriting, it is still an incredibly useful tool for any traveller.
This powerful little app has maps, restaurant locations, shopping recommendations and plenty of other information about great points of interest that the average visitor to a city may never see.
This may look like a nonsensical jumble of letters, but it is actually the name of a new location based weather forecasting app.
That means the app uses the location of your smart phone to give you a personalised weather forecast. This is great for anyone arriving in a new city especially if you don't understand the language spoken by the local TV meteorologist.
This site not only gives user generated restaurant recommendations, it allows users to recommend a specific dish.
In fact, anyone can take a picture of their food, write a review for that menu item and share it with the world. That means before people enter a restaurant, they can find out if others like it and see the most popular dishes on the menu.
This clever little application comes highly recommended from Itunes because of its ability to tell users where they are in most major airports or malls.
That means the next time someone is late for a flight, they will have a detailed map to guide them to their terminal.
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While they may not be perfect, these apps have, in their own ways, made travelling easier and more fun in 2010.
As new and better apps are created, travellers will undoubtedly become more and more reliant on their smart phones and the wonderful apps therein.
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