Is it just me, or does travel manage to keep becoming more and more of a headache? Every time I check, there are fewer flights and more regulations. (Last time I flew home to see my family, I was nearly detained by Homeland Security — apparently it’s very hard for scanners to tell the difference between Gouda and plastic explosives.)  Travel is stressful enough without worrying about whether you wrote your schedule down right.

With so many crucial details to keep track of for every trip, travel information can be next to impossible to manage even when you’re not exhausted and jet-lagged. My mobile travel app of choice has been Fizz Traveller, but when top Windows Mobile developer Spb Software House announced a major update to their travel program, including a complete redesign of the interface, I decided it was time for another look.

The brand new Spb Traveler 2.0 can’t help much with the liquids rule or the absence of in-flight peanuts, but it does aim to make the life of a traveler a little bit easier with itinerary tracking, flight search, weather, a full set of conversion tools, and a jaw-dropper of a globe. To this road warrior, that sounds like something worth checking out further.

Let’s get the upgrade comparisons out of the way. The original Spb Traveler could give you almost as much information as the new Traveler 2.0, but it was released pre-iPhone. That was back when people wore out their styluses and didn’t insist that interfaces be artistic paragons. For the update, all of the display screens have been completely redesigned to be easy on the eyes and friendly to the fingers. The program automatically color-coordinates with your device’s theme. It also supports gestures for changing screens and scrolling. Basically, it got a makeover courtesy of TouchFlo 3D.

Spb Traveler’s package of travel tools is broken down into city information, trip assistant, converters, and an extremely pretty animated 3D globe. You can jump between these categories using the nice finger-friendly icons at the bottom of the screen.

City Information

The first screen you see on starting Spb Traveler is the cities page (the buildings-and-clock icon). You can add as many cities as you want, but too many will slow down the program when it tries to update. The city list seems to be based on airports, so it’s decent but obviously not comprehensive. For each city on the list, you see the essentials: current time and weather. Spb Traveler is sold internationally (Spb itself is based in Russia), so cities are shown with country, not state, and national flag.

Tapping a city brings it to the top, where more information is accessible. The four boxes under the city name take you to pictures (which play as a slideshow where the flag is in my screenshot once they’re loaded), time information, weather forecasts (pre-loaded sources are Foreca and Weather.gov), and city info. Overall, this info is a mix of the really useful, the occasionally useful, and the sheer eye candy. Not that there’s anything wrong with eye candy.

One of the hardest parts of designing a travel program is figuring out what information it should show and how to organize it. Spb has done a pretty fair job of picking city information that should appeal to you whether you’re a businessman or a tourist and letting you ignore what doesn’t. 

Trip Assistant

The luggage-and-calendar icon brings up the trip assistant, where you can create and review trip details. You would think this would be a crucial piece of a travel application, but ironically in the ones I’ve used I hardly ever bothered entering my itinerary. I live and die by my calendar. I don’t want to have to look somewhere else for part of my schedule, and I sure as heck don’t want to peck out all that information twice. However, the new Spb Traveler has some tricks up its sleeve that make it terrifically different.

I’ve started entering an upcoming business trip. Trips are stored as .xml files in a location you specify for each trip, which is handy for data and memory management. The trip by itself isn’t terribly useful, so I’ll add a trip item. Choices cover the usual suspects but also give you flexibility to enter something like a stagecoach or camel caravan using Activity.

Now, magic is about to happen. Look down at the left-hand screenshot of the entry screen, and notice that all I put in was the flight number and the date. Can I have a volunteer from the audience to press the "Find" softkey?

Ta-da! Spb Traveler automatically pulls in the rest of the flight information. Words cannot express how much I love this feature. It saves HOURS of typing. Traveler even handles continuing flights — same number, but different destination — with a reasonable amount of grace; it shows you legs until the one you want comes up. Hitting "ok" adds the flight to your itinerary, where you can bring up the full details again and even check flight status.

Even better, Spb Traveler adds the flight to your calendar. This is another amazing feature, especially because it happens in the background without you having to do anything. The flight shows up on my third-party calendar app immediately, with all the details attached. My mobile calendar syncs wirelessly with my company’s Exchange server, so just like that the data is everywhere. In what is probably a first in world history, Spb Traveler actually makes it easier and faster to enter data on your handheld than on a computer. 

Travel Tools

The next section of the program is represented by a Swiss army knife. Spb isn’t kidding with the symbolism here — there are definitely more travel tools than will fit into a 1-gallon Ziploc bag. Most of them are well-executed versions of fairly standard travel program fare, including units, clothing size, and exchange rate converters, a tipping calculator, and a world time assistant.

Three tools that you won’t find just anywhere are Flights, Phrase Book, and Geo Game. Flights lets you see options for getting between two cities on a given day. I can imagine this coming in handy when your flight is canceled and the ticket counter is swamped. You can also use this tool to add flights while you’re creating a trip.

Phrase Book lets you convert dozens of basic essential phrases (including, apparently, "Are you divorced?") from several main languages into most of the major world tongues. Unfortunately, like most phrase books there’s no pronunciation guide, so double-check before you make a move on that hot divorcee.

When you’re either sick of solitaire or want to tell yourself you’re doing something with educational value, Spb Traveler has you covered with the Geo Game. The object is to match countries with their capital or flag, and after each question an animated globe will whirl to the country/capital/flag in question. This defends Spb from the charge that they’ve made up half of these places.

3D Globe

The last area to explore within Spb Traveler is the animated globe. When you install the program (either with an .exe over ActiveSync or directly on the device with a .cab file), you might notice it takes up a whopping 8-10 MB of storage space. Blame the globe, and then decide whether you can forgive it. It and the city pictures are the only two elements of this program that hit me off-key, like they’re trying just a bit too hard. Or maybe it’s me, and I’m not used to having enough device memory to tolerate a little decadence.

With all the options activated, the globe will show the night shadow and the current cloud cover as it rotates between either the cities that are in your favorites or that are involved in a trip. In Cities mode, touching a city banner takes you to its forecast; the banners in Trip mode jump you to the details for that leg of the journey. Or you can just put a finger on the planet and spin it around.

This is the same globe that stars in the geography game, and in both cases the animation handled itself reasonably well on my Touch Pro. It ran smoother in the Globe activity than in the game, probably because it wasn’t whirling back and forth so much. The globe is one of the least useful, strictly speaking, features of Spb Traveler, but besides looking really cool and being a fantastic show-off point, it’s kind of mesmerizing. The little line between cities on a route in Trip mode makes me feel like Indiana Jones.

Conclusion

With this update, Spb Traveler takes the world by storm… literally. The polished visuals and touch interface, ease of use out of the box, and balanced feature set make it a worthy addition to any traveler’s mobile toolkit. Spb Traveler is smartly designed to work with what is already on your device, not frustrate you by isolating your data or duplicating features. In addition, the one-two punch of flight lookup and effortless calendar integration adds up to a knockout.

Vital Stats

Spb Traveler retails for $29.95 at Spb or in the JAMM Store. Owners of 1.x can upgrade for $14.95. It’s compatible with Windows Mobile 5 or 6 devices in a variety of resolutions.

If you’ve downloaded Spb Traveler previously, make sure that you have version 2.0.1, released Nov. 10, which fixes several annoying bugs.