During our time away in Hong Kong, Sydney and Tokyo, we decided to use iPhone apps whenever possible to get by. These are the apps we found useful:
- Instapaper – brilliant for keeping light reading to hand. The pro version is needed unless you can live with just a small number of pages.
- Dropbox – for travel documents, and entertainment.
- Built-in Maps app – generally filling the cache when we had WiFI and then using the GPS on the 3GS to find our way around.
- The built-in Screen shot (hold iPhone menu button and power button) – great for capturing images of maps with a route on when you have WiFi but think you might lose the map or directions out of the cache later.
- Todo – for getting junk out of our heads so we could forget about stuff and enjoy ourselves.
- FelaurPDF – transport maps which were too large to view on the in-built PDF viewer.
- Power Plug – visual reference for the power sockets around the world.
- Metro – for finding our way around Hong Kong and Tokyo.
- Weather Pro – use this everyday to plan for the weather.
- Currency – handy for converting back to GBP.
- The built-in camera app – obviously, but useful to snap route information to look at later.
- Sydney Travel Guide from Fidesereef
- HongKong Travel Guide also from Fidesreef.
- Tokyo Travel Guide from Fidesreef, again.
- Tokyo Zuti for getting around the train system.
- Tokyo Cool City Guide
- Transit Sydney
- Sydney Street Map – offline map with GPS support.
- Hong Kong 720 (useful before we went)
- NHS DrinksTracker – for keeping score.
We also had TripIt, Dopplr and TripAdvisor apps, but I don’t think we used them.
We picked up one paper guide: at Sydney airport we did a Loney Planet “print and bind” of a chapter of Tokyo from one of their travel guides. This was so that I had something to use on the flight to figure out what we were going to do in Tokyo in a limited amount of time. As a bonus, the guide was bound in an anonymous brown card, making us look less touristy if we needed to refer to it.
