Apps Lists July 4, 2012

Passbook and Siri-like Apps

by Irina Craciun

Until October, when iOS 6 will be released, check out these apps that imitates some of the new features on iOS and temper a bit your anxious mood.

FlightTrack Pro, Boarding Pass, Lemon.com Wallet, and Wildcard Network are alternative apps for Apple’s Passbook. Passbook aims to gather all your boarding passes, various tickets, coupons, and cards in a single place.

FlightTrack Pro can only show you the real-time flight status, a plane’s seat map and the airport layouts, but it can’t store a boarding pass nor any other ticket and coupon. The app covers more than 16,000 airports from the entire world. You can download it from iTunes for $0.99.

On the other hand, Boarding Pass is specifically developed to help you with your airport check-ins. It has support for mobile check-in for more than 40 airlines, it can directly save your boarding pass, and it costs $0.99.

Lemon.com Wallet is a digital wallet app and it is the closest alternative of Passbook. It can store in an organized way all your cards, tickets, receipts, coupons and so on. Just make digitalized copies of your documents. It’s a smart app and it’s free.

Wildcard stores only gift cards and offers you an easy way to buy things from about 15 retailers, including Nike and Zappos. The app is free and enables payments at just few taps.

Now that Siri API has got in the hands of the developers, the personal assistant is expected to do more and to be smarter. Vokul, Sara and Vlingo Voice App are some of the best alternatives to Siri, sometimes being able of certain things that Siri cannot do, yet.

Vokul gets activated only by saying “Hey Vokul” and not by taping on multiple buttons. The app gets along just fine especially with driving or jogging. Mainly, Vokul can do all that Siri can, except that it cannot read messages out loud.

Producers describe Sara as being easy to use, easy to customize, easy to teach and always free. This personal assistant can also set reminders, have conversations and it can be trained to acknowledge new orders. Sara is available on Cydia only for jailbreak iPhones.

Vlingo Voice is a personal and social assistant. It gets voice-activated, it can search places for you, send messages, dial calls and offer directions and it integrates with your Facebook and Twitter accounts, all of these for free.