10 Essential iPhone Apps for Your Summer Treks and Travels

by Nathan Eddy

More people than ever are flying these days, often resulting in delays, terminal changes and a host of other spontaneous changes in your trip. FlightTrack allows you to keep track of where your flight is, along with live flight maps, weather radar, aircraft type, speed and altitude. You can also track random flights with the shake feature (dont ask me why) and search flight schedules up to 11 months in advance.

If youre traveling to any of Americas 50 largest cities and have a penchant for sampling the local cuisine, LocalEats comes as a highly regarded app to help you find the places where townies like to chow. The app allows you to search by neighborhood, category and allows you to find whats near you with GPS functionality. The app also cuts out all chain restaurants (sorry, Ruby Tuesday enthusiasts) and even offers dining coupons for New York City and Nashville. Post your own reviews or add photos after you dine—after all, thats how these sorts of apps improve.

With the price of petroleum still petulant, finding the cheapest gas around is a sensible way of keeping vacation costs low. Cheap Gas helps you out by finding the closest station to you with the lowest gas prices for all grades of gas. Along with distance display, the app will also tell you how to get to the station and updates timestamps as prices change.

This application translates words, sentences or whole paragraphs between languages using Googles language translation service. Use the switch button to quickly flip source and destination texts. Outside of Chinese, it even has the ability to detect your source language, and supports 41 languages, including far-flung tongues such as Albanian, Galician, Maltese and even English.

One of the greatest parts of traveling is the ability to inspire jealousy in friends through an impressive postcard—especially when you can make it yourself. Postman allows you to snap a photo or even use Google Maps to capture a shot of your current location, then add a greeting or pick a theme to dress it up. The app can deliver the postcard to Facebook, Twitter or an e-mail address (and saves you the trouble of dealing with post offices, all horrible the world over).

City sightseeing can be a challenge due to confusing public transportation systems, but MetrO app helps you out with transportation networks (bus, subway, tram and railway, depending on the city) that give you the best route, closest station and surroundings—without requiring a network connection once the cities have been installed. The app, which lists more than 400 cities worldwide, also updates monthly to keep you up to date with changes (and no, the C train in New York is still not running on the weekends).

There are several currency translation apps available, but with all the money youll be spending (lets not even talk about the dollars strength) why not pick up the app for free? The app provides up-to-date exchange rates for a variety of popular currencies, including the dollar, pound, euro, yen, lira and dozens more.

The Lonely Travel Planet guides, famous for their wealth of inside information, are now available in app form for more than 30 cities. The app allows you to swipe and scroll through the table of contents to find what you need and includes offline maps with multitouch controls, location based navigation and personalization options.

The Google Earth app literally puts the world in the palm of your hand, granting you a birds eye view of our globe in high-resolution display. Features such as tilt allow you to see mountainous terrain, the Panoramio layer allows you to browse geo-located photos from around the world (and Wikipedia articles) and you can also search for cities, places and businesses with Google Local Search.

If youre the type of tourist who cant stand to be seen toting a guidebook or map, HearPlanet may just be the app for you. HearPlanet is an audio guide with global coverage of more than 250,000 locations and features integrated maps and information on historic sites, cultural landmarks, famous buildings and other points of interest.