These certainly aren't new, but just in case you missed a few, here's a short list of travel tips using free services from Google:
- Check flight status on your cell phone through SMS. You can send a text message to 46643 (daily mnemonics: it spells GOOGLE on the keypad) with any flight number (i.e. NH5) to check the flight status. Google will reference information from flightstats.com and send you a text message response with information about that flight. This trick is good for reconfirming pickup or drop off times before you leave for the airport. Beware of text message charges which may be incurred by your phone company though.
- Google web search can check flight information. If you don't want to check via text message or if you want even more details than the SMS service provides, you can simply search any flight number (i.e. JL 61) on Google's main page. The search results will present a special link to flightstats.com for in-depth statistics and real-time flight tracking.
- Install Picasa. You can load the hundreds of pictures you took into Picasa for light post-processing, tagging, and sorting. You can even attach coordinate tags to your images for integration into a mapping application later.
- Google Earth. Not only can you gain a solid geographical understanding of the places you will visit/visited on your trip, you can also use Google Earth's Geographic Web layer to see community contributed points of interest.
- Localized search. When accessing the internet abroad, Google will typically return localized results for that country. Unfortunately, this means the language displayed will also likely be localized and difficult to understand. To go to an English edition regardless of where you're searching from, simply click 'Google.com in English' found at the bottom of the main page.
