AppsGood and EVO

Tracking flights on your HTC EVO made simple with FlightView

Plane I had a dilemma recently. My lovely girlfriend continued insisting that her flight back home would be early and that I would be a dead man if I was late to pick her up from the aiport. I took a look at my HTC EVO 4G, and knew she had nothing to worry about.

Now, being the good boyfriend that I am, I had a ton of things I had to grab to make her return romantic. But being the man that I am, I decided to wait until the last possible minute to get all of these tasks done. 

So, in between apps, I fired up my recently updated Android Market to look for a good app to track flight times.

My first option was Kayak. I have used their website to find cheap hotels before and figured I'd give them a try. There were two views: details and map. In details view, Kayak showed me the scheduled flight time and the estimated flight time . . . both read 9:30 p.m. I think, "Good, her filght's on time." I switched over to map view, which showed the flight was still over Hawaii (three hours after take-off).

I check Kayak an hour later and realize this app is not the best option.

Then, I turn to a less professional-sounding app FlightView Free Flight Tracker. Hell, this app sounds like it will get the job done. 

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I use up some more of my unlimited data and fire up the app. FlightView is set up very similarly to Kayak . . . except, in the details view, the estimated time of arrival is 9:33 p.m. and the plane is shown over the Pacific Ocean. Excellent! This app clearly had updated (unlike Kayak) and it kept updating throughout the night.

My girlfriend's intuition is right the majority of the time, but thanks to FlightView, I didn't aimlessly show up at the airport an hour early. I arrived at 9:25 p.m. and only had to wait 15 minutes. Of course, with all the extra time I was able to grab a "Welcome Home" balloon and a bouquet of flowers as well. 

The only downside I can see about this app is that everybody who rated it in the Market mentioned battery drain as its biggest flaw. I personally didn't notice this and think that if you wanted to use FlightView for a similar purpose, you would have no issues, but it's worth mentioning anyway.

FlightView Free Flight Tracker is obviously free in the Market; a premium version that removes the ads is available for $0.99. 

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Links: Market (EVO) | Market (web)

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Sam Sarsten

Sam Sarsten is a former contributing editor at Good and EVO, which was merged with Pocketables in 2012.

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