Review SPB Traveler 2.0

SPB Traveler 2.0 provides a service that is invaluable to anyone who spends most of their time traveling from country to country. The market is somewhat awash with this form of software most of which offers the same setup. Full review after the break.

Utilising SPB’s fairly standard finger friendly theme Traveler is a busy application with many features to explore. The above shot is of the main screen. You can have four panels with city information. This is easily changed and quite interesting to flick through. Above I have chosen my home city of Belfast. There are a series of thumbnail pictures to give you a flavour of the city however I noticed this is not for every city. Scrolling down the seemingly endless list I spotted a number of cities I was interested in seeing notable landmarks for. Quite a few only had the country’s flag. Over the weeks I was using this I did however note that the catalogue of shots from around Belfast grew from two to nine, SPB must be updating this quietly.
Each city also has high and low temperatures, forecasts and the time and date. Hitting the City info section connects you to a few web links relevant to the city. You can suggest links for SPB to include as some of these links are far too general. For example Belfast links to The World Factbook of the United Kingdom, Belfast Wikipedia and Belfast Wikitravel.

Next is your itinerary. You can lay out your trip in a series/chain of events. Adding an item gives you nine choices, Flight, Hotel, Train, Car Rental, Cruise, Bus, Meeting, Activity and Note. Clicking anyone of these enters you into a rather familiar and nasty Windows Mobile Calender-esq table. Gone are SPB’s lovingly produced friendly menus. Most useful here is the find field. Giving a little information saves you the hassle of having to input it all as it will scour the net for the relevant information.

Next up is the survival guide. The wealth of information here is likely to be useful on any business trip or holiday. Tipping is a rather simple calculator to work out a percentage for gratuity. This is probably not going to be the most useful thing but it may help if you think you are being ripped off. Splitting may also raise an eye brow as this will make large gatherings rather simple. In fact I’ll be using this on Thursday. Have to remember about it!

Unit conversion allows you to work out many different measurements. Main areas covered are length, temperature, area, speed, weight, volume and pressure. Each of these has a calculator attached not only to work out what something is another way, but you can calculate straightforward sums and can have your answer in all major measurements.

There is Flights section that simply checks OAG for latest information when booking flights. This function does not seem to be interchangeable with online resources. Maybe in the future.

Clothing sees a simple list of clothes sizing across the world. Some country options are blank however a nice touch is being able to add people you know to keep a comprehensive list of their measurements.

An extremely useful and packed feature is the currency convertor. Not simply limited to one currency or another you can check a value across a range of currencies. At the bottom is a note of when the information was last downloaded so you are not working out your millions on yesterdays exchange.

The Geo-game was a great addition. I thoroughly enjoyed this pretty difficult quiz featuring questions about the countries around the work. I surprised myself a few times.

The phrase book has useful phrases in roughly 20 languages covering a variety of different uses. The phrases are given to you in the native spelling as oppose to phonetically, an option that would have been very suitable. I did encounter a problem with some Asian languages. Obviously it require a language pack for Windows Mobile however there is no link to grab this.

Time convertor lets you view times around the world at a glance. You can also add appointments to this that transfer directly into the device calendar. A nice touch.

Overall, this is nice software. Hardly a necessity for the everyday Joe however there is a set group of users for this and they should lap up the clean interface an
d nice presentation. It would be even better had the menus deeper into the software been formatted in keeping with the rest of the package. Other than that this is stable, easy to use and is a good overhaul to the 1.6 released earlier this year. At £23 it is reasonable priced and gives you lot to take with you on the next trip.

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