Just over one year ago, at the ShowStoppers convention at CTIA, MobiMate demo’ed an unbelievably exciting travel concept to me, then called Worldmate i10. MobiMate is known for their popular travel tool Worldmate which won acclaim for being the first smartphone client to effectively leverage and provide real time flight information as well as numerous other travel utilities in a neat, nicely designed package for many smartphone platforms.

The concept I’d seen was the next step in travel “on the edge”. According to MobiMate, i10 would be the perfect virtual travel agent. At the core of the system would be a dedicated Worldmate servers that would accept traveler’s itinerary confirmations from airlines. The idea was that a simple forward of an e-itinerary would automatically add the flight into your Worldmate LIVE plans, eliminating the hassle of having to enter in flight details into your calendar in the process. Once i10 would “know” where you are, it could track your flight’s status for you, and notify you of changes in real time via a “push” message to the i10 client.

Unfortunately, at the time,  i10 wasn’t available at all, and was still in the planning/alpha stages. And so for the next year or so, I relentlessly hounded the Worldmate PR rep (who by the way deserves serious kudos for her forbearance and patience) for the Worldmate i10 Windows Mobile client availability. Since then, it’s undergone a name change (it’s now Worldmate LIVE), and some slight cosmetic facelifts, but thankfully, it’s core utility hasn’t been compromised in any way. After playing around with the Windows Mobile client for a while, I can attest that my initial wow reaction hasn’t diminished with usage, as is so often the case with many wowser concepts that simply don’t convert into bottom line productive applications.

I’ve split up this review into two sections- one focusing on the PC/Online sections of WM LIVE, and one focusing on the Windows Mobile side of the WM LIVE system. The truth is, however, that the LIVE system is meant to be used as an integrated system- without the mobile side of it, all it really is is a glorified online trip planner. The review was conducted on a Vista Ultimate (SP1) PC using Outlook 2007 (SP1) and a Samsung Blackjack II running WM 6. Below is the PC/Online section. The mobile section can be viewed here. For the purposes of the review, I’ll call the Worldmate Live system “WML”.

The first step is getting your travel itinerary to WML. This can be done in one of three ways. Number 1 is for those trips where you either don’t have or can’t access the airline confirmation email. Number 2 requires Outlook and an itinerary email, and Number 3 requires access to the email, but is email client generic- that is, you don’t need to be using Outlook.

As far as the automated conversion that the WML servers perform from airlines, when I tested I got a 100% accuracy result; in other words, the system gave entered in the correct travel details for the flight I was on. It’s important to note, however, that this is to be expected- unlike a voicemail, where I’d accept 90% accuracy, I do not want to headed to airport for my flight a day early, or worse, late! According to MobiMate, the system can process XX? amount of e-itineraries from various airlines and travel providers, like Orbitz.com and other travel agents/web booking sites.

1) Go to the web section of WML and manually enter it in. While a fairly straightforward process, once you get used to the ease of the Worldmate Outlook plugin, it seems to be a downright laborious task. The web interface is clean and Web 2.0ish, with a nicely done Ajax page.

2) Use the WML plugin for Outlook (2003/2007) and simply click on the forward button. This is obviously the way to go, but as noted above, requires both Outlook 2003 or 2007 as well as having the actual e-itinerary from your airline.

3) Forward the confirmation to a user-specific XXXXXX@worldmatelive.com address. This is your personal Worldmate live address, and is essentially what the WML Outlook plugin above does for you- it forwards the airline itinerary to that address.

Once Worldmate Live has your travel deets, (as long as you’ve created the “Trip”), it will match up the flights that you send it and add them to your itinerary.

A trip can consist of various parts, like