Rating: 
Review Conditions
Psiloc’s World Traveler was installed on a Nokia 5800 XPress Music, a S60 5th edition device running on Symbian OS 9.4.
Installation
World Traveler is a native Symbian application and was installed using the Nokia Application Installer that comes with the PC Suite.
First View
World Traveler is a mobile travel-aid application that has been around for a long time. Recently a new premium plug-in has been introduced, called FLIGHTS. Read on for full review.
Main Review
World Traveler is the Swiss army knife for the frequent traveler. It has 6 different plug-ins, namely Weather, Clocks, Currencies, World Map, FLIGHTS and Travel Plan. Each plug-in is an application by itself. Travel Plan is under development and FLIGHTS is a premium plug-in.
The various components of World Traveler have been elegantly designed to effectively utilize the large 3.2” screen of the Nokia 5800. The lower part of the screen contains the icons for all plug-ins. A single-tap on each icon slides the screen to the selected plug-in and the icon animates and lights up so that you know which plug-in is currently in use.
The left soft key at the bottom, Options is used to setup the plug-ins. It is context-sensitive, which means the options vary and are relevant to the plug-in selected. You can also Hide to the background.
Weather
The Weather is the default plug-in that comes up when you open World Traveler. The weather update interval can be configured to be Manual or every 6, 12 or 24 hours.
The temperature can be set to Celsius or Fahrenheit. The weather can also be displayed on the main screen.
The top of the screen has today’s weather, wind speed and wind pressure and an image of clouds, rain or the sun. Hundreds of cities all over the world are covered in the database and a weather update takes under 5 seconds!
World Clock
The World clock displays 4 clocks in the Analog or Digital format. Along with the time it also lets you know if the time in a city across the world is still (Yesterday) or (Today).
Exchange Rates
The currency converter displays 4 currencies. You can set the update interval to be Manual or Daily, Weekly or Monthly periods. When an update happens, the source of the currency rates is not known. I would like to choose the bank from which the currency rate is determined. Handy Converter lets you choose Bank of Canada, European Central Bank or Russian Central Bank as the source of the rates and I think its is necessary.
Travel Plan
The Travel Plan plug-in is under development and I am looking forward to it.
World Map
The World Map plug-in is more of an educational application that displays the city you select on the globe. It also shows your home city.
FLIGHTS
The new feature in World Traveler is FLIGHTS. FLIGHTS lets you search by flight number or by location (city, airport or country) and allows you to save search results, check the status of your flights anytime and be automatically alerted to changes in real-time.
FLIGHTS has been built using a custom developer API which is now available to select third parties who wish to provide travel and hospitality services to World Traveler users. Developers can contact Psiloc at www.worldtraveler.biz/contact.html for details.
Handling
World Traveler is very easy to use. I had no problems getting used to the interface.
But when I have to select a city or country from a long list using the scroll bar on the 5800 is extremly un-user-friendly. Kinetic scrolling is the way forward for such use cases. But its not an issue with Psiloc anyway. I have to mention it because the overall experience of using the application is impacted negatively, even though only a little bit.
Updates for each plug-in can be downloaded independently. Individual plug-ins can be disabled or uninstalled.
Weaknesses
You are asked to select the Access Point for connecting to the internet every time an update happens. World Traveler couldn’t automatically detect a WiFi client. I had to connect to a WiFi access point before World Traveler could detect it and ask if it could connect to the internet using the WiFi AP. Default access point selection and automatic switch to WiFi are features that will definitely delight customers.
Conclusion
World Traveler is available in 18 different languages other than English. The Plug-in architecture allows easy modular updates to individual plug-ins by World Traveler and allows the addition of new applications easily. Except the FLIGHTS plug-in, all others are free to use. You can try out FLIGHTS for a few days before it is disabled. With an elegant and colorful interface, zippy operation and multiple applications in one package, World Traveler is a Must-Have application. I will give it 5 of 5. World Traveler can be downloaded here.
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