Editor’s Note: First a little housekeeping … We’ll be making a few changes to the look and feel of the site over the next few weeks. We think it is all for the best, but please bear with us as we work through the changes. And, it is our pleasure to welcome a new writer to the Daily App – Peter Krass, who has been a longtime friend of Forum Nokia. We’re glad to have his insights here at the blog. Today, Peter takes a look at WorldMate 2009.

Air travel has come a long way, um, down. Gone are the good old days of glamour; in are the bad new nights of overfull planes, cancelled flights, frequent delays, and missed connections. Even if a flight goes as planned, travellers still must deal with unknown weather, local currencies, and multiple time zones. WorldMate 2009, a feature-packed smartphone app, can’t revive the days of Coffee, Tea or Me. But it can help frequent flyers restore at least a little sanity to their travels.

Offered by WorldMate Inc. of Alpharetta, Ga., WorldMate 2009 aims to replace that piece of paper you carry when travelling – you know, the one with your flight numbers, departure times, connections, and other important information. But WorldMate 2009 goes several steps further. It also offers flight status alerts, airline schedules, global weather forecasts, currency conversion, world clock, satellite weather maps, and more.

WorldMate 2009 is essentially two apps in one. The basic version is free, while the Gold version, which offers valuable frequent-flyer features, carries a subscription fee. These Gold services include flight tracking for more than 175 airlines, flight schedules for 800+ airports worldwide, real-time flight alerts of flight delays and cancellations, and satellite weather imagery. Flight schedules, for example, are super-useful when a flight is cancelled; rather than run around the airport looking for a backup flight, you just type in your departure and arrival cities, and a long list of flight options appears on-screen.

Fire up WorldMate 2009, and the first thing you’ll see is the Dashboard. Basically, it is a home page from which you can access all features. Here’s a look:

One particularly fun (and free) feature is called Weathercaster. It reads aloud updated weather conditions for cities located anywhere from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. You can also schedule up to two automatic Weathercaster reports a day. When these times roll around, the updated weather conditions are read aloud. Weathercaster is handy for long, multicity trips; set it for your next destination, and you’ll know whether you need to pack that umbrella or extra sweater. Here’s a look:

Other free features of WorldMate 2009 include a multiday weather forecast for your choice of cities …

… a Day/Night map that shows you where in the world the sun has set …

… and a World Clock that shows the current time in your home city, plus Paris, New York, Tokyo and Berlin. (Unfortunately, if you live in one of those four cities, as I do, then your home city is shown twice.)

WorldMate 2009 is available as a free app in Ovi Store. The Gold subscription, designed for true road warriors, costs $6.95 a month or $49.95 a year. (Pricing is also available in euros and British pounds.) You can “go Gold” from either within the app itself or this Web page. WorldMate also offers a seven-day trial during which you can try the Gold features for free; the free trial is automatically offered when you select a Gold service from the Dashboard.

WorldMate 2009 runs on Nokia S60 3rd Edition and S60 5th Edition devices, and it takes up roughly 2.2 megabytes. As shown in the screenshots above (taken on a Nokia N95 8GB), the app can be displayed in either portrait or landscape mode.

For a closer view of WorldMate 2009, you can watch this short video from the Forum Nokia Innovation Series showing Jonathan Meiri, WorldMate’s VP of Product & User Experience, demoing the app on a Nokia N97:

Happy travels!