The Best Blackberry Travel Apps for the Business Traveller

iPhone apps may be getting all the glory these days, but for many business travellers, the Blackberry is still their weapon of choice when it comes to doing business on the go. Here are our pick of some of the best Blackberry travel apps that no frequent flier should leave home without.

1. Cortado Flight Mode

A must-have for mobile warriors who need access to their full emails during a flight, Cortado's Flight Mode app solves the pesky problem of reading truncated messages on your Blackberry while you're flying. When Flight Mode is enabled prior to take-off, it quickly downloads all incompleted emails before it switches off all wireless connections followed by the handset. Once you're up in the air, turn your handset back on and your wireless connections will remain switched off, and you can blissfully read your emails in complete untruncated ease.

Price: Free, for a limited period. Download it from Blackberry App World.

2. WorldMate Live

WorldMate Live is hands down the best app for frequent fliers who need a comprehensive travel app that organises trip itineraries, issues travel alerts like flight delays, offers easy access to hotel bookings, integrated maps and provides up-to-date weather forecasts, world clocks and currency converters. Their new TripCatch feature identifies travel confirmation emails and syncs them to your itinerary. It even syncs your travel plans to your desktop Outlook, Lotus Notes or Entourage calendar. Don't leave home without it.

Price: Free for the basic app. USD99.95 per year or USD11.95 per month for the Gold app which includes flight alerts, real-time airport information and access to flight schedules. Download it from Blackberry App World.

3. Navita Translator

If you're looking for a multi-lingual app that can translate a mind-boggling array of languages -- just in case you ever had to close a deal in Belarus, perhaps -- look no further than Navita Translator. Aside from being able to translate more than 50 languages harnassing the well-honed services of Google and Bing, it's also capable of speaking languages like English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, German and Russian through its text-to-audio feature. An easy click sends your translation to mail, SMS and even Twitter. Labai geras. (That's 'very good' in Lithuanian, btw.)

Price: Free. Download it from Blackberry App World.

4. Subway & Metro Maps

Singapore's MRT system may be expanding rapidly, but it's still hardly the most confusing in the world. How often have you had to travel to a city like New York, London and Shanghai and spent wasted minutes trying to make sense of the subway map? There are several dedicated apps for various subways networks available in the App Store. If you are headed to London, check out TubeBuddy or Tube Map. For Shanghai, there's Shanghai Metro and for New York City, there's NYC Subway. We're surprised that no one has designed an app for the notoriously convoluted Tokyo Metro, need a challenge anyone?

Price: Free, except Shanghai Metro (USD2.99) and NYC Metro (USD5.99). Download from Blackberry App World using the links above.

5. Google Maps for Blackberry

Remember the days when we had to struggle with those foldable paper maps that were always impossible to fold back into a little neat square? Thank heavens those frustrating times are over and we have Google Maps for Blackberry. Imagine a map of the entire world tucked away in your handheld, available in both map and satelite views, that is able to give you precise directions from your GPS-located position to your entered destination and even translate voice enquiries. Yeah, it's awesome.

Price: Free. Download it from Google Mobile.