travelapp
Latest
Lonely Planet's Trips app is Instagram for travel junkies
If you've ever planned a vacation abroad, you've probably spent some time with Lonely Planet. The company is the largest travel book publisher in the world and offers plenty of free resources on its website and in the Lonely Planet Guides app. The latter provided the inspiration for the latest Lonely Planet project, a new iPhone app called Trips (also coming to Android this fall). At its core, it's a crowdsourced version of the Guides app. But instead of featuring contributions from Lonely Planet experts and contributors, it's all about what regular users have to say and the sights they see on their vacations.
NTT DoCoMo menu translator app hands-on (video)
NTT DoCoMo menu translator app hands-on (video) NTT DoCoMo begins testing automated Japanese / English translation app that actually works (video) NTT DoCoMo exhibits on-the-fly speech translation, lets both parties just talk (video) Have you ever tried to read a Japanese menu? If there aren't pictures to reference, you'll likely have a difficult time figuring out what to order -- unless you can read Japanese, of course. NTT DoCoMo hopes to improve the dining experience for those of us that can't tell our ウニ (sea urchin) from our カニ (crab), building an app that can translate any of 9,000 possible menu entries from Japanese into English. It also supports English to Japanese translation, along with Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese) and Korean translations as well. The app worked fairly well, occasionally mistaking things like salmon caviar for "a rare part of the pork." OK, so perhaps there's a bit more work to be done. Either way, real-time visual language translation is definitely tricky stuff, and could be enormously helpful to travelers once devs figure out how to make it work -- and work well. Jump past the break to see the app do its thing at CEATEC.%Gallery-135633%
Google and ITA's OnTheFly app update puts flexible flight planning in your pocket
Google went through a lot to buy ITA and its travel software, and we saw the acquisition first bear fruit in the form of Mountain View's web-based Flight Search. Now the partnership has produced version 1.2 of the OnTheFly airfare booking app for Android, iOS and BlackBerry. What's new? Flexible date searches that let you peruse departures 35 days at a time, plus a price graph that shows the most fiscally prudent times to travel. Additionally, globetrotters can access their itinerary search history and see price changes for those fares throughout the year. Nice job fellas, now let's work on bringing bargain-basement fare finding for the final frontier in the next revision.
