Last night I was on the phone to my father catching up on the week’s excitement. Of course, the Christmas period is arriving fast and one of his particular tasks this weekend is to pick up Gran. This means driving from Essex to Glasgow, staying overnight and then driving back with Gran. My father quite enjoys the opportunity, I think, to free his mind from BAU (“business as usual”). And as one of the last weekends before Christmas, the big roads should hopefully be reasonably clear of holiday traffic.

When he’s been working hard, my mother likes him to take a few days off up in Scotland before picking up Gran. This helps him get into a bit more of a relaxed mood in the run up to the festive season and also gives him the opportunity to rest before doing the return journey.

On the phone to me last night he explained that he’d not yet had the opportunity to book anything. Time is running out before we approach the weekend and I urged him to sort something out.

“Let me have a look,” I said, reaching for the iPad.

I tapped on the Kayak app, selected “Hotels”, entered “Glasgow” and waited. 10 seconds later, all the results had populated. For the fun of it, I had Kayak remove all the results except for 5-Star. I was expecting a bit of a shock.

However, one of my favourite hotels in Scotland — Mar Hall — was listed there at the top. Total cost for three nights? £432 or £144 per night. Good deal, especially given that the official Mar Hall site was quoting a minimum of £225 for the same Deluxe room.

I consulted my father. Predictably he was delighted. He read his card details over the phone to me and I booked it right there-and-then. It took me about 4 minutes in all. Very, very easy.

Nice work Kayak and nice work eBookers (who processed the transaction)!

It just a week-and-a-bit before I arrive into San Francisco for the BlackBerry DevCon event. I’m in Houston first, followed by New York, before flying into the Valley. So that means I’ve been doing the usual jiggery-pokery with hotels and flights. In many cases, I’ve been lucky enough to have a colleague or agency take part of some of the scheduling and booking. In other cases, I’ve sorted it out myself.

Mid-way through I thought I should really try out BlackBerry Travel properly. I’ve had a wee look previously but I’ve not really had the opportunity to use it in anger since the new Bold 9900 arrived.

It was about time.

BlackBerry Travel is a key offering on the platform — just like Facebook and Twitter. It’s a ‘super-app’ — that is, it makes full use of the device capabilities including calendar and messaging integration.

And it’s magic!

Perhaps the most challenging element of business travel nowadays is juggling everything and having the right information at your fingertips, *all* of the time. My schedule next week is a good example. I’m on 6 different flights, 4 different hotels, 3 cities. Trying to keep all the booking numbers and timings in order gets challenging. You end up having to print stuff out and place it in chronological order just to make sense of it all. Not any more.

Once activated on your phone (and entirely free of charge), BlackBerry Travel scans your inbox. The moment it comes across a booking record email — or any of those long complicated corporate travel confirmation emails, it springs into action. It’s really fast. The app parses the email and extracts all the relevant bits and builds a trip for you.

Now, I knew this. I’m sure I’ve actually had a briefing on this too. But seeing it in the flesh, using it in anger? Amazing.

The first part of my upcoming journey to be confirmed by email were the outbound flights. The email arrived and almost simultaneously, I received a prompt in my inbox from BlackBerry Travel telling me that it had added them.

I clicked through. And, I’m delighted to say I was stunned. Boom! There was the flight schedule and ticketing information organised beautifully. The app then pointed out that although I was due to arrive into Houston on the 10th, I didn’t have any accommodation arranged. Would I like some help with that, asked the app?

Geez! Yes. I clicked. Boom! Again! All of a sudden I saw a list of available hotels along with prices in my local currency. Unfortunately I couldn’t book them as that was being done for me via another email.

When that booking was made — woosh — the BlackBerry Travel app was updated immediately, now with all the relevant hotel details.

Simply phenomenal.

Plus, my device calendar now has the various flight details programmed in. Excellent.

My week has continued like this. As another booking is and received by my email, it’s automatically integrated. So now I have a beautiful itinerary on my phone. Hugely, hugely valuable.

I’ve hooked it up to LinkedIn so it helpfully tells me who amongst my network is nearby at the particular locations in my itinerary. Yelp is also directly integrated too so finding restaurants and the like is that bit easier.

Plus, weather is integrated as well. Useful, because it looks like it’s going to be rather hot in Houston.

I’m seriously impressed.

You’ll no doubt have seen similar from the likes of TripIt (which I also use) however the super-tight and seamless integration with BlackBerry Travel is nothing short of astounding. When I think of the amount of hassle I’ve had to go through in the past writing all this stuff down or printing sheet-after-sheet and placing it all into a special plastic cover.. I’m simply delighted with the app.

If you’re a BlackBerry user and you travel regularly, I strongly recommend taking a look and trying it out.

You can find out more at blackberry.com — you’ll get it on any modern BlackBerry.

I’m off to Houston, Texas, next week. I’m going to the Internet Retailer M-Commerce Forum and I’m very much looking forward to that. My intent is to speak to as many participants as I can to find out how the field of M-Commerce is moving in the States.

My airline of choice is British Airways. Someone asked me why, the other day, pointing out that they very much enjoy Virgin Atlantic. I’ve flown with Virgin now and again but my heart remains with British Airways — and here’s the rub, if I sit and examine why I feel this way, it’s primarily because of their iPhone application.

I have always found their staff attentive, professional and kind — and I do like how their pilots tend to sound serious and competent. I don’t need jokes at 50,000ft. Give me the calm confidence of a British Airways pilot.

Anyway it’s all about the app for me. From the mobile app, the rest of the experience unfolds before me. The fact that I can check-in for a flight whilst in the cab on the way to the airport is an utter joy — and the ability to then be able to call-up my boarding pass and walk straight past the legions of confused and stressed folk checking in on the machines, ahh, pleasure. It makes the business of flying that bit nicer for me.

I really do miss the app experience when I’m flying with other airlines — for instance to Cork recently with Are Lingus. I had to dick about with an A4 piece of paper as my boarding pass. Annoying. Very annoying.

More and more airlines are beginning to get with the programme. However I think it’s fair to say that in terms of integration, British Airways are very much the pioneers. Is that right? I know Lufthansa have been doing a lot in this area. I do enjoy the fact that British Airways have managed to spread mobile boarding passes to a veritable ton of airports now. I should check out the other airline mobile offerings.

Meanwhile today I got my flight details through from the very nice lady who booked the travel. She asked for my executive card number before she did the booking. That was useful because I checked earlier and — boom — the flight is already registered there in the app.

Love it.

(If you’ve had good mobile experiences with other airlines do let me know.)

You can pick up the BA iTunes app at this link.

Like most companies getting involved in the mobile platform, British Airways recognise the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android platforms. Nokia is persona non grata at this time.

The British Airways app lets you access your current and upcoming flight details, check-in and discover flight information, timetables and so on. Plus if you’re an Executive Club member (Oh yes) then you’ll be able to check out your account details.

If you’ve got an iPhone though, it’s even better news though — the iPhone app has been equipped with the mobile boarding pass functionality. Instead of printing out the flimsy bit of paper at check-in, you simply check-in via the app and then, ‘your boarding pass will be downloaded to your iPhone’.

Now I don’t know precisely how that works yet as I’ve not experienced it. It would be highly convenient if the boarding pass was generated as a PNG or JPG and stored locally within the application’s database once you’ve checked-in, so that you don’t have to rely on patch data signal in the airport to take five minutes to call up the boarding pass. I’m sure that’s how they’ve deployed it.

Here’s what it looks like:

A trillion times better than those flimsy boarding passes you have to print out when you check-in at the airport.

Right now you can only use the mobile boarding pass between London Heathrow and Edinburgh (and vice versa). I imagine this is to give staff (and the system) the opportunity to work out the kinks before deploying to wider locations.

It makes SO much sense though. SO much sense. You always have your phone with you. And if you’re a frequent flyer from London to Edinburgh, this will make your life just a tiny bit nicer.

There is nothing worse than having to fumble for your boarding pass as you reach the gate. Or when the woman in WH Smiths demands to see it.

Love it. I hope to see this deployed across BA’s entire operation soon! Yes, paper will need to be used for some time to come but for those who want to erase the tiny hassles from their lives, the mobile boarding pass will really, really help.

And now, here are a few more pictures:

BlackBerry:

iPhone:

Android:

Updated

One of the services I have been most remiss in not writing about after my time in China was SIM4Travel.  Now owned by the chaps over at Truphone we’ve been waiting for ‘a bit’ to see what exciting services they can offer using their own SIM cards.  However, in the meantime SIM4Travel still offers customers their original, cheaper alternative to your own operator’s roaming charges.  Costing £5.99 if purchased with £10 of calling credit the service provides a replacement roaming SIM with its own UK mobile number Jersey-based ’07509′ number which will work in any unlocked phone.  Call costs to these numbers vary (15p per minute from a BT landline at the time of writing), but are often excluded from bundled minutes on mobile tariffs.

I used the service in Spain, China and Dubai during my travels instead of my Three contract SIM to achieve the following savings:

Calling between Spain / UK

• Make call to UK from Spain:
  • 25p per minute with SIM4Travel
  • 25p per minute with Three
• Receive call from UK in Spain:
  • Free with SIM4Travel
  • 10p per minute with Three

Calling between Dubai / UK

• Make call to UK from Spain:
  • 49p per minute with SIM4Travel
  • 180p per minute with Three (contract)
• Receive call from UK in Dubai:
  • Free with SIM4Travel
  • 80p per minute with Three

Calling between China / UK

• Make call to UK from China:
  • 69p per minute with SIM4Travel
  • 180p per minute with Three (contract)
• Receive call from UK in China:
  • 39p with SIM4Travel
  • 80p per minute with Three

In use the SIM4Travel operates slightly differently to a normal SIM.  When a number is dialled a slightly disconcerting ‘Call not allowed’ message is displayed briefly on the handset.  A few seconds later the service calls you back with the number you were calling ringing.  The service is managed via SIM4Travel website, where credit can be added to the account which operates as a pre-pay service, however an on-phone SIM menu is also available for basic tasks such as checking credit.

It all worked brilliantly for me and, having used up the complementary £5 of credit provided for the review, this will be a service I will use again – a particularly nasty bill shock on my contract SIM when I got home reminded me how easy it is to lose track of you spend overseas especially for calls received (I didn’t want to ask my UK-based contacts to bare the cost of calling my Chinese number).

My only gripe, if I have one, is that this service shouldn’t really need to exist.  Your operator ought to be able to offer the same pricing as this service, regardless what technical trickery is used to achieve it.  Having a seperate SIM for overseas use is a pain, but it’s one I’m willing to put up with to avoid the dread of the post-holiday phone bill… and anyway I’ve finally found a use for one of those ‘old’ phones I had tucked away in my desk draw.

However, right now the question is what mobile tech should I take to use and test?  On the list so far:

• Truphone and Rebtel for cheap international calling
• A local China Mobile SIM possibly with some mobile data
• A SIMable chip so I can swap SIMs into any phones I like
• iPhone for music and a simple Mandarin language course
• Some offline maps with Olympic venue POI such as Garmin’s
• An N82 for pictures
• Several Proporta backup batteries
• A netbook for mobile blogging (which one?)
• The Macbook Air for proper computing
• A decent gadget bag – something that doesn’t scream ‘laptop’!
• Some high quality headphones for the flights – perhaps Entymotics?

Any other recommendations / options?  Have you been to China and what was useful / rubbish?