2. TripTracker: Full Function Travel Aid

It's the season of sub-par hotels, sunburn, and never-ending car trips or as some people like to call it, vacation season. Yeah, summer brings out the travel junkie in all of us, even techies. If you're planning any sort of vacation at all this summer, you need to have some way of staying organized. That's why TripTracker was created.

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TripTracker is a great, simple, affordable piece of software that's perfect for the casual vacationer. Other products charge a hefty annual service fee, making the cost of the software sometimes reach above $100. If you just want a casual application to store your itineraries, contact information, and flight numbers, TripTracker delivers in spades.

The software includes a PC app that syncs up with the PDA version, via ActiveSync, to allow for easy data entry and transfer. Of course, you can also edit and enter information on the PDA itself. What I like most about the whole package is the PDA interface. It's so simple yet so detailed. There are separate tabs for your itinerary, world time, expenses, and other miscellaneous data like customer service numbers. Icons are automatically assigned to each event (e.g. an airplane for flight times, a suitcase for hotel check-out time) so just from a quick glance you see what the major points of your day are going to be.

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And, TripTracker also has international travelers covered. There's a currency converter that supports 30 foreign currencies, as well as a screen that shows you four real-time clocks from around the world. Alternatively, you can enter any local time and the program will show you the corresponding times in various international cities.

The expense tracker is fairly simple, but it does a decent job of letting you keep an organized list of your expenses during your trip. There are just a few prompts, like date, amount, and category, and it keeps a running tab. It's not Quicken but it's also much better than just keeping track of everything with Notepad.

At $29.95, it's relatively expensive for a PDA application. However, other options that are as feature-filled can run you three times that. So, for what it does, TripTracker is a bargain.