The PDA Guerilla: SplashTravel Pro

Recently I have been trying out SplashTravel Pro from Splashdata, a travel information package on Palm OS PDAs and smartphones. This is an excellent toolkit for travelers, especially business travelers who are often on the go and who carry a Treo or a Palm PDA (SplashTravel is currently unavailable for Windows Mobile). Its one limit is that getting full use from this package requires a direct Internet connection either through cell phone or WiFi (rather than indirect connectivity through hot-sync). With direct connectivity, this product provides weather information for virtually any location, with the possibility of displaying weather for several locations worldwide in a single screen, which can be useful for a traveler with several destinations. It provides updated information on flight schedules as well as time in any five major cities worldwide the user wishes to specify. This feature can be very useful not only for international travelers but also for people setting up audio and video conferences across multiple time zones or just trying to place a business call across large distances. It also provides conversion calculators -- between U.S. and European clothing sizes, metric and US/Imperial measurements, and financials.

One feature I particularly like is the ability to track and automatically convert expenses. For instance, an international traveler overseas can enter each expense as he makes it in the local currency, classify it (for instance business versus personal, although users can add other categories as well) and see the cumulative total in the traveler's home currency (or any world currency he wishes) at the bottom of the screen. This can be very useful for tracking business expenses or just getting an idea of how much you are really spending day to day on that vacation trip. It also has a very nice calculator for figuring tax and tip and dividing a dinner bill among multiple individuals, all on a single screen.

Overall, this is a very nice application and certainly totally competitive in the market. Any traveler with a Palm OS device should have this.