Symbian in Motion

ShopQwik: A Personal Travel Assistant in the Palm of your Hand

If you are on the go and do a lot of traveling it’s likely you are growing tired of the posed hassle booking flights, hotels and car hire. ShopQwik can do all this and more, so what’s the big deal? It can also do it all right from your mobile handset or PDA! ShopQwik lets you book your flights, hotels, car and if you’re in London you can even pay the manditory Congestion charge - all using using nothing more than the ShopQwik app on your mobile handset.

Starting up, the application asks for a connection to use for downloading information. A 3G connection or Wifi is desirable. Once loaded, the application itself has a familiar looking grid menu with nice big icons and descriptions below them. Scrolling down the menu reveals 16 items and a scrolling information bar at the top which shows information about the icon you have currently navigated to. The menu contains the following options; Flights, City Hotels, Resorts, Car Hire, Itinerary, Flt Track (Flight Track), Weather, Times, Dialling, Currency, City Cam, Notes, Register, Send to a Friend, Settings and Help.

Most of the items are self explanatory, so I’ll be going through some of the more interesting, important and cool ones.

Booking a Flight

Booking a flight using the application is easy although there are a few issues with navigation and user input methods. The “c” button on the handset is not used to delete incorrect entries, rather the back direction on the navi-button, but after using the application a few times you’ll get used to the configuration.

Selecting the “Flights” will take you to an initial screen where you enter the information required to search for a flight. Your criteria, flight dates, number of adults and class can be specified along with your desired destination and departure locations. Clicking next will prompt the application to search and display the available flights based on your search. The list contains information on which airline, times, price and airports the flight will be using. You can scroll down the list to one that meets your requirements and select.

The next screen will give you a a list of the available departure and arrival times available for both the outbound and return flights. Clicking on the desired times will turn them green and you can then proceed to the next screen where you will find your travel itinerary and useful information about baggage, airport taxes etc. If you are satisfied you can click continue to either call ShopQwik to book or pay using your ShopQwik login details. Once you have booked, the information can be found in your ShopQwik Itinerary menu.

Booking a Hotel and Car Hire can be achieved using their respective menus and are very similar to booking a flight.

Cool And Useful Items

ShopQwik has a few cool and useful additions to help you on your journey including your own Itinerary which can be accessed using your PIN registered with ShopQwik. Unfortunately as I haven’t actually booked a flight or registered with them I can’t really tell you what’s included.

The other useful items are the currency converter that looks up the latest exchange rates for you to convert your currency to whichever desired. There is also world clock to help you adjust to the time at your destination and a dialling codes option that shows you the different dialling codes from countries around the world. This will be helpful if for example you are meeting someone at the airport, if you’re running late or just if you need to contact someone when you arrive. A weather menu which shows you a four day weather forecast from many of the major cities around the world is also provided to help you to adjust to the weather before you arrive.

The coolest addition is the City Cam. Currently only available for London (mainly due to the unique way the Congestion Charge is monitored) it allows you to see snaps taken at 10 minute intervals from CCTV cameras located at main junctions in the city. So if you happen to be driving into Oxford Circus you can check the CCTV camera which will show you a snapshot taken a maximum of 10 mins ago of how the area is looking. City Cam lets you also pay the Congestion Charge on the spot using your handset. There is also a Camera Wall that shows all the locations you have visited and displays the camera shots taken from the various CCTV cameras. Cool feature you have to agree!

Conclusion

ShopQwik does a very good job and will be a key feature perhaps initially as an added option using the ShopQwik website itself. It does have many cool and unique features which start to influence the way you travel as the information you require is in the palm of your hand at all times. I do have my reservations about the fact it is based in Adobe’s Flash Lite. I would like to see a native S60 application which utilizes the power of S60 and can incorporate data such as syncing your Itinerary with your calender, paying the congestion charge automatically when you enter the zones and so on. Primarily an S60 client would make it more stable as I’ve experienced a few crashes during my testing time. Also, I would like to see the app display useful information at the top like the time, net connection activity etc.

The ShopQwik application is available for a wide variety of handsets including Symbian, Windows Mobile and PDA. Your handset must have Adobe’s Flash Lite 2.1 installed as the software itself is built in flash so it is merely a User Interface requiring the Flash Lite backbone to operate.

You can get your hands on this great FREE application at the ShopQwik website.

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