I love to travel… I don’t get to head out of town often, but when I do, I need my technology. Being away from my computer for more than a few hours gets me a little twitchy, so road trips have traditionally been hard to deal with. With the iPhone and the almost unmanageable list of applications to choose from, things have gotten much better. I just got back from a road trip from Phoenix, AZ to Long Beach, CA, where Michelle and I stayed on the Queen Mary for an extended party, and my iPhone helped a lot when it came to relaxing and getting things done. Here’s a list of ten must-have iPhone applications for your road trip.

Google Maps

One of the original built-in applications in the iPhone’s OS is the Google Maps app. With it, you can quickly search for your destination and map your route to get there. With your trip all mapped out, you can relax and just check in once in a while for any freeway changes or other details. Of course I’m still waiting for Google to give us turn-by-turn directions on the iPhone for free (yes, I AM that spoiled by Google), but there’s a few (not free) apps out there to try as well. I use Google because it’s incredibly simple and I can jump right to street view to see what the building I’m looking for looks like.

Pandora

My favorite source for streaming music on the web is also my favorite source on my iPhone. What I didn’t know was how useful it could really be on a road trip. I intended to make a note of where in the desert it stopped working, but it just kept working the whole time. Other than a couple times cutting out for about 30 seconds, Pandora streamed brilliantly over AT&T’s 3G network the entire drive. Now if AT&T could just get my phone to reliably make phone calls where I need it to…

Email

Another standard app on most smart phones is an email application and the iPhone has a pretty complete email program and it handles multiple accounts. The thing that I used to hate is coming back home to find thousands of emails to go through. This weekend, I was able to keep up with my two important email accounts and respond to people in a timely manner while removing all the spam from my server to only sync valuable emails when I get home.

TweetDeck

While I tried to enjoy my vacation more than Twitter, I still have thoughts and photos I want to share while out of town. Vacations also offer lots of fun things to tweet about. I’ve tried a few of the top Twitter iPhone apps, but this one is my favorite. Just waiting in line for tickets to the aquarium, I was able to check for new tweets, mentions, and DMs and reply to a couple in just a couple minutes. Then I globally marked the rest as “read”. Easy.

Weather

It’s always important to know the weather where you’re going, and if you’re on a long road trip, this can be tricky. When we drove to Detroit and back last summer, we passed through several states and the weather app was very useful to plan out our wardrobe as well as touristy events.

Safari

Despite the completely unexplainable fact that I still can’t view flash in a web site in Safari on my iPhone, it’s still a great browser. It’s pretty fast and renders very nicely. Best of all, it’s as close as I’ve ever gotten to a real web browsing experience on a phone (except sites with flash). Wireless access in many hotels will run you about ten bucks a day and in the Queen Mary, it didn’t matter because I got almost no wifi signal in my room. Browsing the web over 3G in my room was a huge convenience on many occasions.

Gazette

I read a lot of blogs. I try to stay on top of industry news and events and still read blogs of colleagues and influential bloggers. I could lock down an hour in my room to do this on the laptop, but then I wouldn’t be vacationing, would I? Instead, I prefer to skim my preferred feeds in the frequent spare moments when I’m waiting for Michelle to get ready, the elevator is taking forever, or, dare I say it… the bathroom. Catching up in these otherwise wasted spare minutes leaves that hour free for vacationing.

Camera

I have a digital camera and it takes better pictures than my iPhone, but it also runs on AA batteries, is inconvenient to tote around, and lacks the luxury of instant sharing. With the iPhone’s camera, I can snap off a shot any time and I can take thousands before I run out of space. There’s tons of ways to share my photos, from the Facebook or MySpace apps to Twitter apps to Flickr apps like the one mentioned below. Additionally, with the 3G S, I was able to shoot video, which I found myself doing a lot more on this trip.

FlickIt

One of the apps I use the most, vacationing or not, is FlickIt. It just uploads your photos right to your Flickr account. You can add detailed information and tags to each photo, but I usually just do that later from a PC. The only thing missing is the ability to upload videos to my Flickr account. Then it would be perfect.

WiFiTrak

WiFi is almost always a better option than 3G in terms of speed, but when you travel, you often have to wait until you’re at the hotel or near a hot spot and even then, it will usually cost enough to make you grimace a bit. One way around this is to leech off someone else’s WiFi. Just fire up this app and find a suitable (and open) connection and use it. As seen here, you won’t always find an open router, but when one is nearby it helps to have a fast way of knowing and connecting to it.

Bonus : RDP

What if that piece of information, email, phone number, etc is only available to you from your home or office computer? This happened to me over the weekend. I can’t think of a better test case. Servers were about to be moved and I needed quick access to some IP addresses that were in a list only on my computer at the office. I was on the beach with no other electronics than my phone, but I opened the RDP app and connected to my computer at the office, got the information I needed, and went back to enjoying the beach. The alternative would have been to catch a cab, get back to the hotel, fire up the laptop and pay for the WiFi access. I have only needed this app twice and it could use a little bit of tweaking, but both times it was a life saver.