This week, we’re welcoming technology and gadget expert Phil Baker to PeterGreenberg.com. Phil gives us the rundown on travel-friendly software for your phone.

I’ve been testing two new applications for smartphones designed to assist frequent travelers while on the road: WorldMate Professional from Mobimate and Pocket Express Travel Edition. Each provides a set of utilities that enables you to check airline schedules and flight status as well as perform a variety of other travel-related tasks.

I tested them on a Sprint Treo 700P, but they’re also available for most smartphones (i.e. full-featured mobile phones with features such as email and scheduling software), such as the BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices.

WorldMate Professional

WorldMate Professional provides a collection of services and utilities spread across a dozen screens, including a tiny world map, exchange rate conversions, home and world times, and a calculator to determine the time in any world city for a given local time. A weather screen shows the forecast in five cities and another shows a satellite weather map.

You can list your planned itineraries and sync them to your computer, upload flight schedules from the Web and get real-time flight status. The remaining screens are more fillers such as simple calculators and tables for tipping, converting currency, measurements, clothing sizes, as well as an index of dialing codes, and a packing list.

The flight schedule lets you upload a list of flights for the week or for a specific date. However, in my testing asking for the weekly flights from San Diego to Oakland, I got a listing of the first few flights of the day, but nothing past 10 a.m. When I requested flights for a specific day, I got a longer list of flights, but it omitted the last two of the day.

The flight tracker was equally flaky. Checking a flight already in the air from San Diego to Oakland, it only showed me where the flight originated and its arrival time into Oakland, ignoring segments through Phoenix and San Diego.

According to a spokesman for MobiMate, these problems occur only with the Treo version and will eventually be fixed. I tried the product on a Sprint Mogul Windows phone and it worked fine. WorldMate Professional costs $75 per year and is available at www.mobimate.com.

Pocket Express Travel Edition

Handmark’s new Pocket Express Travel Edition adds a set of travel functions to its popular Pocket Express, which delivers on-demand news, sports, directory assistance (411), maps, weather, stock quotes, movies, and other information to your smartphone.

The new travel component provides flight status, flight schedules, hotel search, currency conversion, and travel phone numbers using one-touch dialing to reach airlines, hotels, car rentals, and travel agents. It also includes a service that lets you speak to a live travel assistant 24/7 from anywhere in the world.

The flight schedules and tracker worked better, but omitted Southwest Airlines from the tracker. I’m told that’s being fixed. The hotel search allowing me to locate hotels based on location, name and price, but reservations are supposed to be made through the reservations through its live travel component.

Something called “live travel” is a personal concierge service that can fulfill any legitimate request. It can find and book a reservation, call a doctor, reserve a limousine, and so forth, similar to services offered by credit card companies.

Pocket Express Travel Edition costs $70 per year without the concierge service and $100 with it. This includes the entire Pocket Express application with its many other capabilities.

Of the two products, Pocket Express Travel Edition is a better value and it provides more tools for solving problems that travelers typically encounter.

For many of us frequent fliers, the best feature is the flight tracker and the schedules, although this type of information can be accessed for free using a Web browser. And, while these programs are helpful, they’re not absolute necessities for those who already have their own special elite numbers for the airlines, rental car companies and hotels.

By Phil Baker for PeterGreenberg.com. Phil Baker has developed consumer and computer products for Polaroid, Apple, Seiko and others, traveling millions of miles doing it. He holds 30 patents, was San Diego’s Entrepreneur of the Year and writes a weekly technology column for the San Diego Transcript at www.sddt.com/phil. Read Phil’s blog at https://blog.philipgbaker.com.

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