IT’S a quarter to five in the morning, and I have a plane to catch in two hours. But why rush out the door if my flight is already delayed? To check its status, I turn to my iPhone, tap on an application called FlightTrack and pull up my flight. It’s on time. Better get out of bed. At the airport, I check for Wi-Fi and update all my newspaper apps (NYTimes, WSJ, USA Today and so on) so I have something to read onboard. And when I arrive at my destination, I use the iPhone to pull up the Yelp app, and its built-in mapping feature, to find the most highly user-rated bars and restaurants.
Sure, I could have easily stumbled across that pizza place on my own and gotten by without the Cantonese catchphrases I downloaded in an app-buying frenzy. But as Apple’s iTunes Store has continued to grow with thousands of apps, I’ve come regularly to rely on the gadget as an integral part of my travel routine. (In fact, apps were part of a recent discussion about travel gadgets I had with the New York Times technology columnist David Pogue, which can be viewed on The Times’s Web site at video.nytimes.com.)
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