After many years clinging to Windows Mobile hoping for a miracle I finally gave up this year and switched to an HTC Aria from AT&T running Android—the open source phone OS from Google. I’m with AT&T mostly because it has the best international roaming options, and the Aria is their first really sweet Android phone (and tiny!). A lot has been written about iPhones and iPads for travel and photography, but for those of you with or considering or owning an Android phone here are the applications I’ve battle tested and relied on in the 20,000 miles of road and air trips I’ve completed in the 90 days I’ve had the phone…

iPhone users don’t despair, as most of these applications are also available for the iPhone, some for Blackberry and Palm and a few even for Windows Mobile which is quickly self-destructing. Like the iPhone, Android applications are pretty much self-updating so they continue to improve with almost no work on your part, a pleasant change from the heavy lifting of the Windows application model.

Google Maps & Google Navigation & Google My Tracks

This suite of three free applications from Google (one or two of which may already be installed on your phone) are an amazing set of navigation tools as long as you are in the USA (assuming you have a US domestic unlimited or large data plan) and someplace in the cellphone network. Google Maps is based on the application of the same name for your computer plus it offers location sensitive search (like Bing does for WM) and can overlay any KML (Google Maps and Google placemark and route files) file over your map. So you can see the map of where you are or the satellite view, and also be following any type of route that you or someone else has made.

We used it to follow the original pavement of Route 66 for example as most of it is long gone but some enterprising soul made a KML file that traced the route carefully. We could follow it practically by braille by putting the phone with the map and route up on the dashboard.

Google Navigation adds a full turn-by-turn routing capability the equal of the expensive $10/month services offered by AT&T and Apple. Very cool and getting better all the time. It does not have all the features of a dedicated application like Copilot (which I own and use in parallel) or TomTom (which I used on WM) and of course it only works when you are on the cellphone network, but it is really easy to use and even includes a beta capability to try to follow bicycle and walking routes.

My Tracks is a beta application you’ll need to download but is wonderful for tracking your bicycling, hiking or other travel-based sports activities. It automatically creates tracks you can share or upload to Google Maps or to a Google Doc and will give you all sorts of cool information about your route including the maximum slope, altitude change, and of course speeds and mileage. I can slip the Aria in my shirt pocket and easily use it to keep track of my bicycle rides, hikes, or even photo treks. My i-GotU does the same thing but My Tracks lets me seee my progress using Google Maps right on the screen of my phone while I’m still in the field.

Google Sky Map

If you are like me you forget the names of stars as often as you learn them—especially when you’re in a new location. Google Sky Map uses the combination of location detection and your phone’s compass to show you the map of the stars wherever you point the phone. While not critical for star trails it certainly makes star-gazing a lot more fun.

Photographer Tools

CamCalc

For those times when you want to double-check your Depth of Field assumptions or do some other quick photo-related calculation there are a variety of free and inexpensive photo calculators for Android (just like there are for the iPhone). The one I’ve settled on so far is CamCalc. I use it mostly for DOF & solar angle calculations, but it also features field of view, flash calculations and color temperature conversions. You can find it by searching for CamCalc in the Android Marketplace.

My-Cast Weather

The built-in weather and many free sources of weather are great, but my favorite weather app is My-Cast Weather. It has integrated radar, satellite, storm tracker and hourly, daily and text forecasts.

Tides

There are many different tide table applications for Android but none of them really stand out for me so far. I’m currently using aTides from SlimJim. It has a lot of North American data, charts days and uses gestures to navigate forward and back. But there is plenty of room to improve here so I expect new leaders to emerge.

Audubon Birds

The very popular iBird is only available for the iPhone, but the good news is that Audubon has published a very credible alternative—Audubon Birds--through Green Mountain Digital.It’s $20, but it is well worth it for any serious or aspiring birder or bird photographer. The latest update includes migration maps and the product already includes plenty of images, songs and other information on most North American bird species. The application still crashes more than I'd like but it seems to be improving with time.

Time Wasters—I mean Entertainment

Audible, At Bat, Google Listen, Pandora, Slacker

Everyone has their own idea of entertainment when traveling, but personally I enjoy listening to books available on Audible (now part of Amazon), listening to my favorite San Francisco Giants using At Bat ($15/season from MLB), tracking my favorite podcasts with Google Listen, hearing a likely music mix with Pandora or listening to pre-defined radio stations a little like satellite radio with Slacker.

Utilities—Dolphin HD Browser, K-9 Mail, Advanced Task Killer, Ringdroid

The built-in Android browser is based on the open source webkit browser but there is a much slicker upgraded and amazingly capable version called the Dolphin Browser HD which is also free. It adds tabbed browsing, more speed, bookmarking, downloadable add-ons like Firefox, plenty of navigation features and skins.

Similarly K-9 mail is an upgraded but still free alternative to the built-in android mail client. Advanced Task Killer is a nice to have if you need to kill applications that otherwise might run in the background and Ringdroid is a free application that lets you quickly cut out sections of any of your MP3 songs to use as a ringtone.

Trendy Traveler Applications

Two applications that come into play when you’re looking for something upscale are Opentable and Zagats. Opentable provides a free online interface to the restaurant reservation system of the same name—making it easy to get your dinner reservations locked down when you stop for gas, and Zagats is a location sensitive version of their excellent reader contributed restaurant and hotel guides. Both require that you be online to use them but they make planning for your next evening’s stay a snap. Zagat helped us find out there is an amazing cheesesteak place in Gettysburg for example. Unfortunately it is not free but a reasonable $10.

TripAdvisor also features a nice, free application front-end to their amazingly complete hotel and restaurant review site. On a more pedestrian note the Yelp application is a quick, location-sensitive front end to the site of the same name—which makes it easy to search for local businesses of any kind wherever you are and see what other users have thought about them. FlightView is a great way to keep track of your upcoming flight or the in the air status of flights you are waiting for.

Finding Applications

I’ve provided links to many of the applications I use, but not all of them have full websites. More typically Android applications—like their iPhone brethern—are located in the Marketplace where you can search for them, download them, and even purchase them using your Google Checkout information. If you decide to un-install them after a quick trial you can usually get fully refunded.

Carriers like AT&T only allow subscribers to load applications from the Marketplace, supposedly to keep the phone from malware. But if you need an application that is not in the market it isn’t too hard to download and use the Android SDK to to install an application from your computer.

Why Android?

Obviously iPhones with iOS are all the rage and have nearly unlimited application support but I really like the more open platform and open source base of Android and its major applications. It is the fastest growing mobile application platform in the world so support for it is also moving forward very quickly. Any gaps in its application portfolio are quickly being filled. And you get a choice of many different hardware providers. But it does take more work to get an Android phone set up exactly the way you want it than the iPhone which is a tightly integrated hardware and software offering.

And Windows Mobile is archaic by comparison, with slow multi-tasking, creaky and expensive application downloads, a touch-unfriendly native interface and the promise that its next version—Windows Phone—will be incompatible. A shame for those of us who invested many years growing and evolving with it. PalmOS could become a great competitor but it is way behind in market support so it has its work cut out for it.