MobiMate has updated its popular travel application and service, WorldMate Professional Edition, for the coming year, while Neohand has brought its weather forecast service, Weather Center, to Pocket PC PDAs and smartphones. Both applications use the Internet to bring up-to-date information to handhelds.

WorldMate
Currently available for Palm and Pocket PC but not Symbian devices, WorldMate Professional 2005 is compatible with a new desktop edition of WorldMate. It offers travelers and corporate travel planners enhanced itinerary and trip management capabilities, synchronization, pre-planning, and en-route travel itinerary updating.

WorldMate users can now collaborate with the WorldMate Desktop Companion and receive over-the-air (OTA) updates whenever a change is made to an itinerary. WorldMate's Desktop Companion also lets users send these saved itineraries from WorldMate to anyone on the Web via e-mail as a file attachment.


WorldMate Professional for Pocket PC

MobiMate CEO Nadav Gur explained, "Our goal is to provide business travelers and business travel organizers with the means to manage their travel needs from any platform they want. Giving users functional cross-platform capabilities allows them the freedom to choose how, when and where to create, manage and use WorldMate's trip and travel planning services."

According to MobiMate, WorldMate's Desktop Companion also offers travel planners benefits such as consolidated and precise coordination of multiple trips for numerous passengers, including profiling and trip preference management features such as aircraft seat assignments, meal types, hotel arrangements, frequent flier accounts, car rental service information and more.

Off course, WorldMate still includes world clocks with automatic DST calculation, a world map with day/night display, 5-day worldwide weather forecasts from The Weather Channel updated online, a currency converter with daily exchange rate updates, and more. It sells for $69.95 with a one-year subscription to the flight schedule service.

Weather Center
With Neohand Weather Center, Neohand said you could download and store current conditions and detailed weather forecasts for your choice of more than 5,500 cities worldwide. You select a home city as well as up to five additional preset cities.

These preferences are saved. Then, updating occurs with the tap of a button. Seconds later, a seven-day forecast overview, coupled with current weather conditions, is downloaded to the device and remains there until the program is updated again.


Weather Center

Neohand said its servers are updated 48 times per day with the latest weather information. Weather Center sells for $12.95.