Written by Peter Murphy on Saturday, December 15, 2007

WorldMate for Pocket PC, It’s Free.

MobiMate have a number of useful travel tools for PC, and today they have announced the release of WorldMate for Pocket PC. WorldMate is a travel utility application that let’s you, track your itinerary, flight information, check world weather and world times, has a suite of travel tools and international conversions. It’s available now and it’s free!

Los Angeles, CA (December 14, 2007) – WorldMate, Inc., the leading provider of mobile travel services for the road warrior and frequent flier, announced today the launch of its mobile travel solution for Windows Mobile Professional Pocket PCs at no charge to road warriors. As a result, it now supports all major smartphone platforms through its Freemium business model.
Subscribers across the globe can download the application for free from virtually any mobile device.

There are also premium services that require a subscription that costs,
US $74.95 a year. There are a lot of travel utilities out there, but I downloaded this, after looking at the press release, to have a look and I can survive without the premium services. I downloaded WorldMate to my Dell Axim x51v, via BT DUN, the cab is 7.5 Mb and it downloaded flawlessly. When I saw the size of the cab file, I was a little worried, but I was able to install to SD card without a problem, ( I install everything I can to the SD card to save device memory). I played with the application for about five minutes, and was sold. For a free program it offers a great range of tools that are not only handy for a traveller, it offers practical everyday tools. Hit the link to read an overview of what the free WorldMate has to offer

So what’s WorldMate got? The free version offers, world clocks, global weather forecasts, converters, world day/night map, tip/tax calculator and itinerary viewer. If you want to spring for the premium rather than the “freemium”, it adds real-time flight status, comprehensive flight schedules, satellite weather imagery, a global dialling code guide and a packing list organiser. I’m just looking at the freebie (don’t call me a cheapskate) so let’s get started. As I’ve said download was easy and installation went without a hitch. After installation, you come to the screen that says, if you want to free up more space on your device you can uninstall programs, click on OK to get back to normal operating status. When you get back to the today screen your greeted by a new plug-in, that says “tap here to start WorldMate for the first time” which activates a wizard, that is quite self explanatory, easy to follow. Tap on the today plug-in, set your home location, accept the licence agreement, setup your WorldMate account by entering your email address, confirming your email address, and entering a password. (requires a data connection of some kind), tap on submit and your good to go. Once your setup, the today plug-in displays world time and local weather. So let’s look a bit further, there’s the weather centre, Flight centre, travel tools, converters and my itinerary.

Flight centre is completely premium so I won’t go there at all. You will notice, in most of the screen shots, that there are buttons that have a star, which denotes a premium service. The Go Pro button takes you to a form that guides you through the subscription process, and the invite button, opens outlook windows messenger contacts, so that you can send them an invite to use WorldMate. So I’m really going to tell you about the weather centre, travel tools and the converters, included in the free app.

Weather Centre

Well the weather centre is pretty self explanatory when you first open it, it shows your local weather. The starred satellite button takes you to premium sign up. The world weather button takes you to a customisable world weather screen that let’s you add four locations, and see the local weather in that location.

The blue arrow next to the city name let’s you select which city is displayed, in that slot of the four. there is also an option of choosing by zip code, for you US residents. The detailed button brings up a screen that only displays the weather information for the city you have selected to view details.

Travel Tools

Travel tools includes clocks, day/night global map and the tip calculator.

Clocks gives you four world clocks that are customisable!
The Day Night Map works well
There’s also a tip calculator but I don’t want to go all Seinfeld a you. It calculates, tips for a variety of different countries, for a limited range of services.

Converters

Then you have the converters, they include clothing sizes, weights and measures, and currency. For a free program, you get a real lot for your buck. I’m going to keep this! I’d say have a look at this, and subscribe if that suits you. As it is, the free version offers plenty of great tools that we can use every day.