What's In my Smartphone?

Its a cliche of having a blog entry of "what's in my bag", and since everyone of us are stuck with our smartphones, I believe, its time to focus on them.

Being a traveler by heart and as one of my perks in the job, the pen and paper will not always be reliable. I often leave my planner at work (since it is quite heavy) and I have a lot of notebooks inside my bag, I tend to forgot what my trips are. Good thing, there are FREE applications for android phones that can substitute as my travel diary.

So what did I download on my reliable smartphone for my upcoming trips? here's the list:


1. TripIt Travel Planner. FREE ON ANDROID PLAYSTORE.

It basically keeps track of your upcoming travels, including flight time, airline and destination and even who are you with on these trips. If you upgrade on Pro, it will also be able to track your mileage points and share it to your network.

How to use it:
1. Send your itinerary receipts to plans@tripit.com. The soft copies of your tickets, or even your itinerary will be uploaded to your phone and that's it.

You can print this itinerary via wifi connection to your printer.

2. XE Currency Converter: FREE ON ANDROID PLAYSTORE

Every traveler needs one of these converters, especially when you are on your budget trips. I chose the XE Currency Converter app since I find it more user friendly.

How to use it:
1. Choose the currencies you want to track. Just don't forget your local currency for budgeting.
2. You can choose at most 5 of these currencies, and set them into Rates and Inverse (on settings --> currency details --> rate and inverse), so you can keep track of the inversion rates too.
3. You can set the currency you want to keep track of. Since I will be bound for Hong Kong in the next two weeks, I have HKD and Peso on the top of my list.

The XE currency automatically updates itself on current market buying conversion and even tells you when was the last update. Just keep in mind that selling and buying rates are different from each other but at least, you have an idea of how much are you spending.

3. EHK Hong Kong MTR app: FREE ON ANDROID PLAYSTORE

As I have mentioned, I will be going to Hong Kong and since they have a very good MTR system and I don't want to be lost on foreign land, I downloaded the EHK MTR app that can be found in the tourist website of Hong Kong and on the Android Playstore.

I find this app useful on checking how to get into one station to another. It has the different MTR lines, including transfer lines that you need to take from one point to another. Aside from the stations, it is also presents the duration of the trip and the cost.

I have more apps on my phone, but I believe these are the best for travelling.