WorldMate Live Video

WorldMate Live Video Transcript

WorldMate Live ? First Look 6/26/08 Dek: Power travelers can get flight status, weather, itinerary, and conversion tools on their cell phones. ### Are you a frequent international traveler? Coordinating flight times, meetings, and currency can be a challenge, especially if your brain thinks you're in one time zone and your body thinks it's it another. I'm JD with CNET DL.com and this is a FL at WorldMate Live. ### WorldMate Live is actually a two-part service. There's an application that sits on the phone and then a Web service that helps you enter your trip itinerary. Basic WorldMate Live services are free, but many useful features, like flight status updates that are pushed to your phone on travel day, are locked up until you upgrade to the premium service, which costs about $10 a month or $100 for a yearly subscription. This video shows the basic, free version and any timed trials of specific features. ### During set-up, you'll enter in your home city, but that's something you can change at any time from the interface. There are four panels for managing the program features. Managing itineraries is by far the most important feature. I've entered an itinerary from my online account, and the flight times and meeting appointments also show up on the phone. I can click into each item for more information. Changes can be synchronized from a selection on the context menu, where and it's also possible to text the itinerary to a phone contact and check out the destination weather. ### The pane for the weather center also provides information in varying degrees of detail, from a three-day forecast to detailed and satellite reports. The Flight Center lets users search for statuses and schedules (Hanoi is 893). However, subscribers don't have to search and get status alerts automatically pushed to their phones. Those alerts include flight details, on-time status, and gate changes, and automatically updating your meeting times into local times, so you don't have to sit there and add or subtract 8 hours when you're deeply jet-lagged. ### Finally, there are the travel tools, like the world clock and tools to convert currency, measurements, and even clothing sizes. Very important if you've ever tried buying shoes overseas. ### WorldMate Live is available for Windows Mobile and BlackBerry phones, but if you don't have one of those, don't despair. There are still working versions of WorldMate, minus the Web syncing, for Nokia and Palm. They're available as trials from CNET Download.com. I've noticed a few performance issues with crashes on this device, but that's something I might be able to put up with if I traveled frequently. I'm JD and this has been WorldMate Live. Happy travels.