In an effort to make your business trips (and really, any kind of trip) more manageable and efficient, I’ve put together a roundup of some of my favorite apps for the iPhone that can be used while on the road or in the air, and I hope that they’ll come to good use for your next trip.

TripIt (Free)
Briefly mentioned in my 10 Father’s Day Apps for Your No. 1 Dad article as a companion to the application TravelTracker, I only thought it would be fair to give this genius a close-up, because it’s just so darned worthy. Think of all of the itineraries and travel confirmations you deal with such as air, hotel and car — and multiply that by however many destinations you have in one trip. That’s a lot of paper juggling that I don’t need while I’m on route. Now there’s a way to keep and organize all travel documentation in one central accessible location — TripIt for iPhone/iPod touch.

Once you book your travel and have signed up on tripit.com (membership is free), just email your itinerary to TripIt’s designated itinerary email address, and in a matter of minutes, your itinerary will be read-in, parsed and displayed into your account like magic. Once you launch the TripIt application, you’ll see your confirmations displayed and organized elegantly and so efficiently, it’ll make your trip that much more effortless.

When you sign-up, TripIt collects some basic information about you, as well as multiple email addresses you might have, so that they recognize your emailed itineraries from wherever you’re sending it. Some things I noticed while testing is that your email confirmations have to come from a TripIt-supported site. All of the major airlines and hotels are on the list, and even if yours is not (Holiday Autos was not on the list for my car rental), you can simply add the info manually, and it will be displayed along with all of the other automated confirmations you might have already sent in.

Timing: The International Clock (99 cents)
If you’re like me and on the road (or in the air) quite a bit, working with international clients and suppliers and scheduling meetings for a foreign time zone from within a different zone than I’m used to can be a bit messy — but not anymore. I’d like to introduce you to one of my new travel companions called Timing by SplashData.

We’re all aware that our iPhones come with a standard (but pretty slick) app called Clock which allows us to track the current time of multiple cities around the world; but what happens when you need to know a specific future time of city A while in city B? Among other things, Timing takes the guesswork out about calculating time zones.

Now all I have to do is launch Timing on my iPhone and choose Time Calculator. I select the current city I’m in (or the city I will be in), along with the time I need calculated, and I can then select up to four other cities to view their respective times. Sweet.

1Password Pro ($5.99)
Previously, since there wasn’t a method of sending vCards from my iPhone, I didn’t bother sending them from my desktop, either, as a quick copy and paste from my address book did the job. To that end, I was quite guilty of storing sensitive data within those vCards, such as banking info and credit card numbers. With the recent release of iPhone software 3.0, we’ve all gained (or will soon gain) the ability of MMS and also sending contacts (vCards) via MMS or email. Since then, I’ve been scrambling to clean all the sensitive data out of my vCards and immediately began my crusade to find a new home for my sensitive data.

Like many others, I’ve always been reluctant of using third-party apps to store this kind of data. Discussed in Weldon Dodd’s Password Management Roundup article, Weldon effectively covered the major features of 1Password, and since then, Agile Web Solutions has revised the app for the iPhone, which is now called 1Password Pro, and it is my new confidant. The Pro version now includes a special easy switching mode that allows you to quickly copy and paste credit card info and usernames and passwords to other apps such as Mobile Safari; and they say more features are on the way. This is in addition to their already brawny list of invaluable features such as two-way Wi-Fi synchronization with the desktop application.

You now have at your fingertips, a two-layer defense (unlock code and master password) for your most sensitive data which include your electronic wallet (for all of your banking and credit card info) as well as passwords and logins to your most frequented (and secure) web sites.

1Password Pro is $5.99 for now, and will increase to $14.99 once the anticipated features are in place.

Remember The Milk ($25 per year)
Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a list nut. I keep lists for practically everything, and it was truly heaven-sent when I heard about Remember The Milk. Your business trip (or any trip) wouldn’t be efficiently organized without the best to-do list application around.

Remember The Milk is an online to-do list manager, which comes with a spiffy app for the iPhone or iPod touch. Use it as your packing list, your to-do list before trip and even your to-do list while on your trip. Remember The Milk isn’t like any other to-do application you’ve seen. You can create tasks based on locations so when you’re going about planning your day, you can easily map out each task location and follow the most practical route to complete those tasks when going from point A to point B. Among many other things, Remember The Milk also comes with your own inbox email address which you can use as a sharing point to collect tasks from other applications you might be using, so that all of your tasks are consolidated in one central location.

The best thing about Remember The Milk is that it integrates with a large number of popular online services such as Gmail, Twitter, AIM, MSN, Facebook, as well as SMS (if your mobile network is supported). What’s more, Remember The Milk now supports push notifications. With all of these reminder methods at your disposal, you would have to try really hard to miss a task.

iTranslate (Free)
Never again will you have to worry about being lost in translation, or having to hire an expensive personal translator — no matter where you go. The developers over at Sonico have come up with an application that allows you to translate over 42 different languages right on your iPhone.

The iTranslate engine is based off of Google Translate and is compatible with both iPhone and iPod touch. Now you can ditch the expensive and pesky human translator and travel with confidence.

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Going on vacation used to be such a quaint exercise. You took your camera (plus batteries and rolls of film) and, if you wanted much more than that, you took a notebook to jot down your thoughts. If you had a bit more money, you might have dragged a camcorder with you (do you remember how big those things used to be?) plus the spare tapes, batteries and back-brace for when you wanted to shoot without a tripod.

(If you don’t get the joke, and really, you won’t unless you’re over 30, you have to appreciate that those things used to weigh a lot.)

Today, going on vacation is much the same. There’s still a healthy checklist of media essentials, but they’ve changed in form and function quite considerably.

So, I went to Scotland last weekend, and, like any good geek, I spared little thought for appropriate clothes and footwear, but instead filled my case with only the most crucial gadgets. Here’s the rundown.

Hardware

• Canon EOS 450D
• Assorted lenses for the Canon
• Tripod
• Sony Handycam HDR-TG1
• MacBook Pro
• Airport Express
• iPhone 3G

Storage

• Memory Stick Pro Duo Mk II
• SDHC

Miscellaneous

• Card adaptors (x2)
• USB cable
• HDMI-USB cable
• Ethernet cable
• Battery packs (x3)
• Chargers (x4)
• Multi-adaptor

I could have traveled a bit lighter had I taken my MacBook Air instead of the Pro, but the Handycam records in 1080i HD, and the first-generation Air just can’t handle HD video without slowing to a terrible crawl.

Also, the Canon DSLR spits out gorgeous, RAW-format photos in glorious 10-megapixel resolution, and that demands the power of a machine at least as competent as the MacBook Pro. Choosing the MacBook Pro certainly added weight to the journey (significantly so, when compared with the Air’s feather-light 3 pounds) but you just can’t argue with the gain in graphics performance.

At the End of the Day…

Each day in Edinburgh yielded hundreds of photos and dozens of videos. In the evenings I dumped the data from the camera storage cards to the MacBook Pro hard drive — a convenient and fast “backup” solution which allowed me to keep the used-space on the cards as low as possible. In addition, I used iPhoto and iMovie to import the day’s captures, making them easily available to the entire iLife and iWork suites.

Sadly, the hotel offered a horrible pay-per-hour broadband service with a customer portal so convoluted it rendered my Airport Express utterly useless. I was looking forward to creating a small private wireless network the MacBook and iPhone could enjoy; instead, I was permanently tethered to the wall.

So, why couldn’t all this media management wait until I got home? I suppose it could have, but I wanted to enjoy the immediacy of getting back to the hotel room and, after a few minutes of importing-and-sorting, email my photos to friends and family. I also had an opportunity to test the ecosystem of iPhone, MacBook Pro plus cameras to see how well they worked together.

More than anything, it was an opportunity to test my Apple gear on the road, to see how well Leopard and iLife did in the field. It should come as no surprise then, when I say they performed admirably. What can I say that hasn’t been said already? iLife rocks. iPhoto and iMovie make media asset management simple and sexy. I didn’t just look forward to reviewing my photos at the end of each day — I looked forward to using iPhoto to do it!

Simply Heaven

There were some (small) drawbacks. The MacBook Pro sports only two USB ports, which is usually fine when I’m at my home office or in a Starbucks somewhere. In a hotel room, where I’m connecting cameras and iPhones (both for syncing and for charging) those two ports feel suddenly meager. Maybe that’s my own fault for not bringing a hub, but looking at the PC laptops out there, many of which feature four or more USB ports as standard, I found myself wishing Apple hadn’t been quite so minimal in their designs.

After being spoiled by the exceptional battery life of the Air, it’s a real shock to the system to get “only” two hours out of the MacBook Pro. Sure, disabling the discreet graphics card helps, as does turning off the Bluetooth radio. And let’s not forget that two hours is still an hour and a half more than most other laptops can hope to offer!

But the thing that was missing — most obviously missing — was the place of my iPhone in all of this. I took no photos on the iPhone because the built-in camera is a joke. I recorded no video because I don’t want to jailbreak my phone.

The combination of MacBook Pro, Mac OS X and iLife ’09 was symbiotic heaven. Everything worked perfectly together, and I never once had any issues with drivers, required updates, missing codecs or any of the myriad issues that so often plague other systems. I just really wanted my iPhone to be a part of that beautiful symphony. Instead, it just sort of sat there, desperately seeking a decent signal (usually missing in Edinburgh, it seemed to me).

The bottom line — and this is coming from someone who has been traveling far and wide for many years, usually with non-Apple solutions — is that the MacBook is a far better device for road-warriors than I imagined. IBM ThinkPads, Acer TravelMates and other traveler-friendly laptops are crammed full of software and gimmicks that make them apparently near-indispensable for those who find themselves traveling between hotels most of the time. PC manufacturers spend much time tweaking their laptops to be “ultimate” tools for road-warriors, but this usually means skimping on performance in favor of energy efficiency and battery life. (And in those cases, six, ten or fifty USB ports are worthless when the machine is so hopelessly underpowered it could barely cope with one attached device!)

Until now, I never had much confidence (or patience) in the other laptops I’ve owned to want to use them in the field…well, nothing beyond simple document creation or email correspondence. But I never once doubted that the MacBook would be a true workhorse — reliable and consistent.

As though the point needed hammering-home, a friend of mine also spent the weekend away, taking his Acer TravelMate with him. While he was away, connected to his hotel’s Wi-Fi, Windows Update pushed some patches to both his network adapter and his email client (in this case, Windows Live Mail). After a restart, his network adapter failed to initialize. One painfully slow driver-rollback later, he got back online, but his email client wouldn’t load — not until he had completely removed Windows Live Mail and installed a fresh copy of Windows Live Essentials (because “Essentials” is precisely the right word to communicate “Email and Photos” to everyone, right?)

This means he never got the photos I emailed him while I was in Scotland. He had to wait until he got home and could solve his software problem. And because MSN Mobile wouldn’t recognize his live.com email address, he couldn’t use his phone to stay in touch, either. Ouch.

I’m off on vacation again soon — a week in Turkey this time — and boy, am I glad I’m taking a MacBook with me. If you haven’t made your MacBook a standard part of your vacation packing-list, I heartily recommend it. You’ll wonder why you never did before.

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