iPhone Travel Apps: Three Reviews from the Road

The iPhone has proven to be one of my most-used pieces of travel gear. I’m constantly trying new apps, searching for something that is not just cool, but is actually useful. Here are three of the latest candidates.

EverNote for iPhone and iPod Touch — I’ve been searching for awhile for an app with which I can make notes on my iPhone and then edit them on my MacBook, and vice versa. It seems like a simple thing, but I’ve yet to find the perfect app. EverNote isn’t perfect yet, but it’s slowly getting there.

EverNote allows you to create text notes, copy snippets from web pages, take photos, and make audio notes while offline and then sync them to a free account on the EverNote servers. To access them on your computer, you can either use a web browser or their free application, which syncs with the server and makes editing possible. Notes can be managed, tagged, edited on the computer, and then re-sync’d and further modified on the iPhone. It sounded perfect.

I tried it first for a few days and quickly grew frustrated because it crashed constantly and I was losing too much painstakingly-typed work.

To make it things worse, after creating a note and syncing it, I would often be unable to edit it further on the iPhone — I was allowed to append new text to the original note, but couldn’t not see or edit the note itself. I nearly deleted it, but a recent update saved the day.

It still crashes from time to time, but mostly on start-up — stare at the green loading screen for more than 10 seconds and you should just close it and try again. I’ve only lost my data once in the last 2 weeks of steady use — a few paragraphs that I grudgingly retyped. You are able to save as you type, but each time you hit save, it takes you out of the edit mode and you have to hit a button to re-enter, then scroll down to the bottom of the note — this takes 5-10 seconds, so it’s a bit of a pain. It also sometimes repeats a section of text twice after syncing, requiring me to delete the redundant copy.

Audio notes are easy to use, are kept to a small file size (.wav files), and can be emailed from within the app or from the computer — a quick and simple way to send personal messages to friends and family. It can also translate text in photos into searchable text — a feature I have yet to find a use for on the road.

I use it for keeping a daily journal and for writing posts while trapped on a bus or waiting out a rainstorm. Switching between notes is fast and easy, so I have a note that stores my most-used CSS code, allowing me to do a lot of text formatting before I even start up WordPress.

When a story idea hits me, I can use the search feature to dig through my notes and copy out relevant passages, saving time and hassle. This is definitely one to watch.

Rating: 4 out of 5 | Link | Cost: Free

7.0 Megapixel Camera — This app claims to be able to generate a high-resolution 7-megapixel image from the iPhone’s rather anemic camera. I took several shots using it and compared them in Photoshop to identical photos taken with the native Camera app. While the file size of the images was larger, all the app was doing is stretching (interpolating) the image to a higher resolution, much the same way any photo-editing software would. There was no additional detail in the photos.

Due to the calculations required to stretch the image, there was a good 5 to 7 second lag between photos, so don’t expect to capture any action as it’s happening. There is one useful feature in this app: it has an easy-to-use timer, so you can push the three-second button and have time to rotate the camera and get your ugly mug in the shot. There is also a ‘time-lapse’ feature where you can set it to take a photo every 15 seconds or so, but I’ve yet to find a need for it either. Save your money.

Rating: 1 out of 5 | Link (iTunes) | Cost: $.99

myLanguage Pro — This translation app really got my attention when I first heard of it. It allows you to type in a phrase in English and then translate it into any of 55 languages. It requires an internet connection for use, as the translation is generated on their server — a limiting feature, but not necessarily a deal-breaker. I downloaded the free version and immediately noticed that it was completely useless to me for Asian languages.

It would translate my English text in to, say, Thai, but displayed the translation in Thai script. This did me no good, as I can’t read Thai. If I could, I probably wouldn’t need their software.

Before committing it to the digital waste basket, I checked their site and saw that the Pro version offered a “transliteration” feature which would convert the native script into something that I could, in theory, actually pronounce. In addition, 20 languages also included audio pronunciations though none of them were useful to me at the moment. (Languages with audio: Arabic, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish)

I shelled out my five bucks and tried the Pro version and found that the transliteration feature worked, but still failed the practicality test. I’m sure the notation it produces is correct and makes sense to a linguist, but I’ll be damned if I can figure it out. As an example: “hello” in Thai is often spelled “sawatdee”, which makes it easy to sound out. myLanguage Pro gives me “swasdi” with bars above the “s” and “i” characters and a dot below the “a”. I have no idea what to do with that and the app doesn’t tell me.

The phrase “do you understand?” reads “kun kow jai mai?” in my phrasebook, but the app gives me the indecipherable mess you see here. I also found that it will translate numbers, but only if they are spelled out.

For languages that use the Roman alphabet, this app could be extremely useful — so long as you have a network connection. If you are traveling in the East, Middle-East, Greece, or anywhere else with a non-Roman alphabet, I’d give it a pass for now but watch for future updates.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 | Link | Cost: $4.99

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