10 Apps for adventure

Smart phone applications for the WideWorlder

In the old days preparing for adventure often meant a tour around the expedition emporiums of London, filling enormous trunks with everything from blunderbusses to snuff. Carrying them was the porter’s job leaving you free to point your sextant at the stars or write final, enigmatic entries into leather-bound journals before succumbing to the local tropical disease. These days, despite the disappointing dearth of porters (and indeed blunderbusses and snuff), it’s still possible to carry everything you could ever need with you on your travels, but thankfully  it can now all be neatly packed into a sleek and shiny little gadget. Apps have revolutionised the smartphone into a true digital adventure multi-tool and the iphone is leading the charge. With that in mind here’s our list of the ten best apps for adventure:

Best for: Not dying in a tricky situation
App: Army Survival
Price: £1.19

You may have watched a few episodes of Ray Mears in your time, but stuck in the middle of nowhere, can you really remember which berries aren’t poisonous or how to build a shelter that will get you through the night? Well fear not, the US Army’s Field Survival Manual, the military authority on all things not-dying, has been condensed into a weightless collection of ones and zeros that you can flick through, search and bookmark. Complete with 1400 pages of detailed guidance, diagrams and photos, on everything from how to light a fire, to ropes and knots this app could, quite literally, save your life.

Best for: Finding things in the dark
App: Flashlite.
Price:  Free

The trouble with torches is that they’re never, ever around when you need them. The ‘Flashlite.’ App aims to sort all that out through the simple expedient of filling the iphones screen with bright, white light, allowing you to wave your arm around like some sort of cybernetic tentacle and see what on earth is going on.  It has a red mode to maintain night vision and even an emergency strobe, which one user on the App store claims helped him guide in a rescue helicopter when injured out on the Moors. Handy.


Best for:  Making yourself understood
App: Lonely Planet Phrasebooks
Price: £5.99

Remember those devices from Star-trek that instantly translated other languages so that Captain Kirk didn’t have to resort to pointing and talking louder? Well we’re not quite there yet, but the Lonely Planet Phrasebook Apps are certainly a start. Simply download the language that you’re after from a choice of seventeen, including Mandarin and Swahili, select the phrase you want by flicking through the menus and your  iphone will read out the phrase for you. Whilst holding an iphone to a foreigner’s ear to get yourself understood may not be the most elegant way to interact, it could end up preventing any unfortunate misunderstandings caused by your complete inability to pay attention during double French.

Best for:  Stargazing
App: Star Walk
Price: £1.79

How many times have you looked wonderingly up at the stars, only to wish you knew a bit more about them? Well now you can. There are plenty of Star Gazing apps out on the iphone, but this is one of the best. If you have a 3GS it has an augmented reality mode, just point it at the sky for a digital representation of what you can already see, cunningly overlaid with loads of juicy star-based information. There’s also a virtual time machine so you can see how the sky will change through the night. The super-slick interface together with eye-wateringly pretty graphics tie the whole thing together nicely.

Best for:  Organising your trip
App: TripIt (and TravelTracker)
Price: Free (£4.99)

Gone are the days when you needed to drag a big folder full of dog-eared printouts and hastily written notes around to remind you which flight you’re on, when it leaves and what your reference numbers are. Tripit is a clever website that let’s you forward your confirmation emails (flights, hotels, car-hire etc.) to its ‘itinerator’ which strips all the important information out and organises it into a master plan that you can easily access on the Tripit iphone app. If you want to get even more sophisticated the Traveltracker app takes all that Tripit information and adds extra features such as flight status, frequent flyer miles and expenses tracking.

Best for: Reading on the go
App: Stanza
Price: Free

E-books are great for when you’re travelling, but at the moment they’re a bit on the pricy side for most of us and if you’ve already got an iphone then Stanza could be a great solution. With 50,000 classic and non-copyright books available for free as well as access to the latest bestsellers through internet stores, you need never be bored at the airport again. It may lack the tactile pleasure of paper, but with touchscreen page turning, storage for a library’s worth of books and the ability to adapt to almost all e-publishing formats Stanza is well worth a look.

Best for:  Finding food in a hurry
App: Urban Spoon
Price: Free

Finding somewhere to eat in a foreign city can often be a nightmare but this app takes the pain away. First select a cuisine type and a budget and then simply shake your phone until its slot machine selector comes up trumps.  Urban Spoon is a classic iphone app that’s been around for a while and even featured in Apples TV ads, but the latest version has been updated for the 3GS with an augmented reality function. It’s list of restaurants and reviews is based on newspapers, bloggers and most importantly users. Absolutely essential.

Best for:  Avoiding currency confusion
App: Currency
Price: Free

Buying things abroad with well known currencies like Euros or Dollars is usually straightforward enough – once you’ve got over the shock of how little the previously mighty Sterling is worth these days. However if you’re dealing in Vietnamese Dong or haggling in Honduran Lempiras then things can get complicated quite quickly. The simply and aptly named ‘Currency’ App makes the whole process easy with an attractive and clear interface that will quickly let you know whether you can afford that market  trinket that will never see the light of day on your return.

Best for:  Keeping up with your blog on the move
App: iblogger
Price: £5.99

Want to keep your blog going even when you’re on the North Face of the Eiger? Well this is the App to do it – that at least is the view of one reviewer who did just that. Compatible with WordPress, TypePad and most other major blogging sites, iblogger lets you upload text, photos and location links at the touch of a button. Not as glamorous as leaving a journal to be found under the ice in a hundred years time, but certainly more timely. Just don’t get frostbite when you take off your gloves to tell people about what you had for breakfast.

Best for:  All things Navigation
App: Motion X GPS
Price: £1.79 (Lite version free)

Perhaps the ultimate navigation App for the iphone there really isn’t much that Motion X GPS doesn’t do. Whether you’re into walking, hiking, running, surfing, skiing, flying, racing or geocaching Motion X really can make your outdoor life smarter and more enjoyable. It not only tells you where to go, but also plots tracks and times of where you’ve been and can upload your position automatically to Facebook and Twitter. You can save hundreds of waypoints, see how far you are from famous landmarks or use the built in compass to get your bearings. A great App that’s more powerful than many dedicated GPS devices hundreds of times its price.