TripIt turns chaos into order by making it easy for anyone to:

• Organize trip details into one master online itinerary — even if arrangements are booked at multiple travel sites
• Automatically include maps, directions and weather in their master itinerary
• Have the option to book restaurants, theatre tickets, activities and more right from within the online itinerary
• Safely access travel plans online, share them, check-in for flights, or print an itinerary

Automatically get itineraries with all your plans, weather, maps, restaurants and more since the site adds information to your itinerary from various sources like:

Google for maps and directions

NOAA for weather information

Seatguru for airline seating information

Wikipedia for city information

Eventful for local event information

Flickr for city photos

Opentable for dining reservations

Visit www.tripit.com and sign up for a free account. The site will send a confirmation email asking you to validate your email address. Once you click on the confirmation link, you will be asked to add additional information about yourself. At this point make sure you enter any email address that you may forward travel plans from. The email addresses you enter will help the site identify you when you forward your travel plans via email.

Forward any travel confirmation emails that you receive from your airline, hotel, rental car, or online travel site with the details about your travel bookings. You will forward your travel plans to plans@tripit.com via email.

Tripit works by automatically organizing all your travel confirmation emails into your master itinerary.

Access your travel itinerary via the web or login via your mobile device. From the website you will be able to review a number of key points in your travel plans.

You can drill deeper into your itinerary and review the details. The deep dive will provide you information like, seating information, weather, and recommended restaurants for dining.

You can also share your travel plans with your contacts from multiple site and links. Placing a check mark in the check box next to the contact will allow you to forward your itinerary to the selected contacts.

TripIt Mobile - m.tripit.com

TripIt Mobile is a slimmed-down interface that’s designed specifically for mobile phones. You simply point your mobile device to m.tripit.com. TripIt Mobile works with Apple iPhone, Palm Treo, RIM Blackberry, or any mobile device with a web browser.

TripIt Mobile also displays Closeness Matches and Activity Alerts so it’s easy to stay on top of what’s going on in your TripIt network.

The iPhone view is much nicer a display than the Blackberry view although both will provide the much needed information when and where you need it.

TripIt To Me - email query

TripIt To Me is a feature that lets you get your trip information from anywhere you have access to email, including laptops and mobile devices.

Just email a command to plans@tripit.com and TripIt will respond right away. For example, if you email “get trip” to plans@tripit.com, TripIt will email back your trip itinerary.

The Tripit To Me pocket card available in .PDF for here - Pocket Card, provides you additional features when requesting you trip information from Tripit.

Tripit is a great site to help the traveler organize your itineraries and provide you a deep dive of information for all of your travel plans.

This is one great site and gets 5 stars from me!

Now is the time to learn that you can do so much more with your BlackBerry®. The best thing about it is, it’s free!

Google offers several applications for the BlackBerry® to help make your life a little easier. Let’s talk about the applications themselves first and then we will go into how to install them from your BlackBerry® device.

Available Google Applications

• Google mail (Gmail) - Send/receive your Gmail from your Blackberry®. Google takes it one step further and allows you to view HTML formatted emails as well.
• Google Maps - Styled after the Google Maps app online, the BlackBerry® version takes it one step further from GPS enabled devices and will locate you (similar to the publicized iPhone process) and show traffic on major highways. Google Maps also provides step by step directions as well.
• Picasa - View the pictures you had uploaded to your Picasa photo album online on your BlackBerry® easily. No need to buy micro memory cards. All you need is a signal.
• Google Docs - Google Docs allows you to compose, edit, store and share documents online with others. There are some size limitations but you can access the documents you have posted to your Google Docs repository and view at the click of a button. Currently PowerPoint documents are not viewable on the BlackBerry®, but Rim has mentioned this would be added natively in a future release. Excel and Word docs work great.
• Google Reader - Delivers your favorite news and blogs to your device with ease. You can even set up rodcohen.com to receive the latest posts!
• Google News - Provides you up to date news information from various sources that you can configure and access easily.
• Google Sync - Allows you to sync your BlackBerry® calendar to an online Google calendar. Then you can share your calendar with others. You also have the ability to have public and private calendars. This options is useful if you want to allow your family to see your schedule should you company use Exchange.
• Google Search - One click, OK, one push of a button and you are taken to one the best search engines out there.
• Google Mobile Updater - This tool helps to keep your Google applications updated. Although I have found that you must go to this updater and run it every so often to check for newer versions. It will not automatically go out on it own and check.
• Google Talk (Gtalk) - IM chat client, very useful for keeping in touch with business associates, friends and family. This is downloaded separately from the other applications. Explained later in this tutorial.

Wow, did not think I was going to get through that list. Now we should turn our attention towards installing these applications. In some ways, Google made this simple and in others ways…not so simple. The first challenge is finding out where to go to download the applications. Usually you can simply Google BlackBerry® Google apps, or Google apps for BlackBerrys, but these do not always provide the correct links. This is why I have written this tutorial to help you locate and install these great apps.

Step 1: The first thing you should do is apply for a Gmail account. It is easier to do this online at mail.google.com or you can use the same link for your Blackberry®. Once you have your Gmail account set up you can now move to step 2.

Step 2: Navigate to m.google.com/a or google.com/mobile from the browser on your BlackBerry® to download the free application. I have found that some Blackberry® devices can get to the first link and some can’t. Let me know if you can’t access either. The application is free from Google, but carrier charges may apply.

Step 3: The application should begin installing all apps except Gtalk. We will need to download that from another web page. Once completed you should have the apps on your Blackberry®.

Step 4: Install the Gtalk app from talk.google.com.

Step 5: Log into any one of your Google apps with your user name and password and take them out for a test drive.

To set up your convenience key to access any one of the Google apps. For the BlackBerry® 8800, Go to Options->Screen/Keyboard->Convenience Key-> select the Google app you want to access.