We’ve already looked at some of the best travel apps of 2012, and with 2013 now well underway, we’ve gotten wind of another neat little addition to your travel-app repertoire.
Stow landed in the App Store today, serving up a sweet tool to help you pack everything you need for a trip. And here’s how it works.
How it works
First up, you’ll enter your name/pseudonym, gender and so on, and at this stage it also asks you whether you wear contacts, glasses or reading glasses. You wouldn’t want to leave home without them…right?
It will also ask you to include essential items as part of your profile, so presumably things that you will need for every trip – the options include things like first aid kit, iron, water bottle, and key items of clothing. You can also add multiple people to your profile, which will be handy for families.
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To kick things off proper, you choose from a template as your starting point, with options such as beach trips, business trips, camping trips and so on. After this, you’ll enter a name of the specific trip (e.g. ‘Boston Meeting’), dates, and who from your list of people is going on the trip. You can then customize the list by adding/removing items.
You can even ‘pack for weather’, with items suggested accordingly for ‘warm’, ‘cold’, ‘rain’ and ‘snow’. Here, it would be nice to see Stow tap real-time weather forecasts at this point – granted, this would only work if you’re creating a list within a couple of days of departing, and weather can change, but it would be a nice integration nonetheless.
You can then tweak the list by adding/removing items, email the list to others, save it as a basic template and so on.
In a nice touch, Stow also lets you set a specific number of days of clothes to bring, and the app adjusts the amount of clothes needed.
The app is optimized for iPhone/iPod Touch devices running iOS 6, and will set you back $1.99 or your local currency equivalent.
While Stow is a nice app, I think it would be better following a freemium model – get folk on board with the free version, and then invite them to upgrade for extra features. There are already other nice packing apps out there, such as TripList which we’ve covered before and which has a free Lite version, but Stow does bring a really nice alternative to the table – just whether users will be willing to spend $2 without having the chance to try it first, remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, check out the official promo video for yourself below.
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