The Business Traveler's Passport series of iPhone apps provides essential information to the international traveler. The apps provide the "soft" information that can be hard to come by without personal experience in the country, such as how to greet people, what sorts of gifts are appropriate in different settings, and background cultural information.

While there are a number of different Business Traveler's Passport apps available, they share some common characteristic & features:

Navigation
Navigation is fairly straightforward. The chapters are broken out as tappable sections. A closed book indicates the section hasn't been read yet; an open book indicates that it's been read. So if you'd like to read it straight through, cover-to-cover, you can do so.


Buttons at the bottom also bring up the Bookmarks, Settings, and About screens. A tap on the Travel chapter brings up the sections within that chapter:


Within Electrical, we can see the voltage, along with a basic line drawing of the electrical plugs & outlets commonly found in the country. It's one thing to know that the outlets will provide a certain voltage type, it's quite another to see exactly what the outlets will look like.



Once we're reading text, there are several navigation possibilities. The text can be dragged up & down like you'd expect, but you can also tap on the left or top to scroll up one screen, or tap on the right or bottom to scroll down one screen. The two buttons in the lower left are Show Bookmarks and Add Bookmark, the middle buttons navigate to the Previous/Next Chapters, and the two buttons in the lower right are Search and Change Font Size. A Back button is in the upper left, for returning to the table of contents. There's also a progress bar at the top, along with the current page number.


Font Size
The font size of the text can be changed to be quite small, quite large, or somewhere in between. Reading while riding on the train, for example, is much easier with the larger font size.


Colors
The text & page colors can be chosen among several different combinations. If it's dark and you'd prefer to read white text on a black background, everything is still legible.



Screen Orientation
The screen can be set to display in portrait, landscape, or auto-detect.


Links
Physical addresses, email addresses, URLs, and phone numbers are all linked to the appropriate app. Physical addresses bring up the Maps app, email addresses start the Mail app, phone numbers bring up the Phone app (or an add-as-contact dialog on the iPod touch), and URLs load in Safari.