Wherever a modern person goes, he is accompanied everywhere by a smartphone. Even on vacation. This can sometimes be a problem, and often, a smartphone turns into a digital leash, which pulls the user out of rest into the world of work and everyday routine.
Of course, it’s impossible to avoid the positive aspects. A smartphone greatly facilitates the life of a modern traveler. Do you need to find accommodation in San Francisco or book an exotic rent a car in Tulsa? No problems! The smartphone is your chief assistant, because many of the applications in it allow you to unload your hands, head and lighten luggage.
Tickets and Travel Planning
The user encounters the first and most obvious advantage of a smartphone at the beginning of the journey. It’s about electronic tickets. Most of the railway and airlines in the world have been working with electronic tickets for a long time, which saves users from having to carry papers. Large foreign hotel chains are also gradually switching to the use of electronic tickets.
As practice shows, a paper ticket is quite easy to forget at home or lose, but traveler will never forget his smartphone. This saves modern tourists from a small headache, and save additional time for enjoying a trip.
Travel planning is also simplified thanks to such applications as Google Trips or TripIt, which allow you to store all tickets, reservations and route schedules in one place.
Maps and Guides
The times when a traveler had to carry around a heap of bulky maps and guidebooks were long over. This means, most tourists haven’t used any other applications besides the basic Google Maps for navigation for a long time. The main thing is to download in advance on your device maps of cities and locations that you plan to visit. You can do this through the ‘Offline Maps’ menu.
Google Maps contains fairly extensive information about a variety of places and other points of interest. But for an interesting pastime in new cities it’s better to use specialized guides. Among mobile applications, it’s advisable to download the guides from Lonely Planet publisher, or the TripAdvisor service popular around the world. It’s also worth mentioning the Visit a City application, which collects information about attractions and sightseeing routes in the most popular places in the world.
Books or Audiobooks
The smartphone saved the person from the need to carry bulky paper publications. One small device can keep a huge library of text books and a decent list of books in audio format.
In order to listen to audio books, it makes no sense to look for some special software. We recommend using the most common music players. The best choice is the free AIMP player without ads and paid options. There’s no music library in the application, so you need to manually create playlists by uploading files and folders to the player. This approach is very convenient when creating playbooks of audio books.
Also, everyone chooses a text reader app to his taste. The most often-chosen software is Cool Reader or Cool Reader GL version for devices with large displays. Both versions of the application are free of charge, don’t have ads, but at the same time they allow you to very flexibly configure text display settings.
Camera
It would be rash to say that a smartphone is able to replace a full-fledged camera. But if you are not a professional photographer and take exclusively amateur pictures for memory, the capabilities of any modern smartphone should be enough for you.
More expensive models, such as the latest iPhone, Huawei flagships or Google Pixel camera phones, may well compete in the quality of shooting with an average camera. If you want to get the maximum out of your smartphone’s camera, we recommend experimenting with low-priced overhead lenses. Even the cheapest of them can significantly expand the capabilities of a mobile camera.
Some more useful options
Packing before the trip can be quite a nervous activity. In order to simplify this process, we recommend experimenting with the PackPoint application. It allows you to create lists of belongings, and also tells you what you should take with you on a trip. This takes into consideration the season, duration and purpose of the trip.
If you decide to travel to foreign country, don’t forget to install any reliable off-line translator. Even if you think you know the language perfectly, the help of the application may be useful.
Instead of taking a portable console or laptop with you, download some good games, movies, or TV shows to your smartphone. It’s possible that during the trip you won’t watch them, but if bad weather forbids you to stay at the hotel, it’s better to have additional entertainment at hand.