Test driving the Zipcar iPhone app

by Amy Chen on

My brother got married last weekend in Los Angeles, which meant that I had to fly out Thursday night and back to New York City on Sunday. Rather than deal with getting off a long flight and renting a car from the airport — I didn’t think navigating an unfamiliar city at midnight when your body thinks it’s 3 a.m. was the best idea — I cabbed it to my hotel and retrieved a Zipcar the next morning.

I’d also been meaning to test out the Zipcar iPhone app, which lets you unlock your rental straight from the phone. This seemed like the perfect time to give it a whirl.

Here’s what I learned:

Make sure you still bring your Zipcar membership card. Once you activate the app, you need to unlock the car first with your membership card by waving it over the designated area on the windshield. Next, you have to enter your membership number into your phone. Don’t know your number? It’s on your membership card. Though these preliminary steps seem to defeat the purpose of ditching the membership card, your iPhone is now all set to start unlocking and locking your car.

Using the iPhone app to unlock the car isn’t always the most efficient. There were a few times when it took longer to unlock the car with the iPhone — as in, it was much faster for me to open my bag, dig out my wallet, and wave the key over the windshield. Once the novelty wore off, I ended up using the keycard about half the time and the iPhone app for the other half.

Zipcar isn’t necessarily the cheapest option, but it can be more convenient.
My two-day rental cost about $180, including gas and insurance. And unlike major car rental agencies where you reserve a certain vehicle class, Zipcar lets you call dibs on a specific make and model, so I knew exactly what I was getting. The last time I was in L.A., I used Zipcar to rent a Mini Cooper. Unfortunately no Minis were available on this trip, so I settled for the Toyota Prius.

Zipcar requires a $50 membership, which I auto-renew each year. Unfortunately, I’ve only used my membership once so far this year, so I haven’t yet maximized the value. If I factor in the membership cost, the two-day $180 rental increases to $230 — pricey. Tack in the $50 cab ride to and from the airport, and you’re looking at $330. But I’ve long believed that traveling on a budget isn’t always about finding the cheapest price — it’s also picking the smartest option to reduce your stress level. And since I was traveling to my brother’s wedding, I figured it was worth paying a little extra money to preserve my sanity.

The Bottom Line: Consider the Zipcar app as an alternative to your keycard, not a total replacement. I will say the app is good for at least one thing — making sure that I didn’t leave my cell phone in the car (or lose it).

[Photo by Amy Chen]

Space tourism one step closer with Virgin Galactic’s first manned flight

by Sean McLachlan on


The VSS Enterprise, also known as SpaceShipTwo, has taken its first crewed flight. It stayed in the air for six hours attached to its mother ship, the VMS Eve. Two crew members stayed aboard and conducted systems tests. This is the latest aviation milestone in an active month that saw the first overnight flight by a solar airplane and the first unmanned solar plane to fly for a whole week.

This “captive carry” flight was the third for the ship. The first flight of the VSS Enterprise was only three months ago and it appears that the project is developing rapidly. Testing will continue into 2011 before commercial flights start. Tickets for the suborbital flight will be $200,000. Another space tourism company, Space Adventures, promises to offer flights for $102,000, although this won’t happen until 2012 at the earliest. While the VSS Enterprise will detach from VMS Eve and soar into suborbital space, the Space Adventures capsule will launch from a traditional rocket.

Solar-powered plane flies at night

by Sean McLachlan on


An airplane that relies entirely on solar energy has flown for 24 hours straight, cruising along happily through the darkness and emerging into the dawn with three hours left in its batteries. Once the sun rose, of course, the batteries immediately began to recharge.

The Solar Impulse is the product of the same great minds that brought you the cuckoo clock–the Swiss! The entire wingspan is covered with 12,000 solar cells that power four electric engines. Average cruising speed is 70 km/hr (43.5 mph). You can see complete stats on the plane here.

The next step for the engineers is to make the next generation of the plane, one that will fly around the world by 2013. The Solar Impulse is not the first solar-powered airplane, only the first to complete a manned night flight. Scientists and engineers have been experimenting with solar-powered planes since the 1970s and manned flights since the 1980s. This new leap forward will add impetus to a field of study that has so far received little attention from the press.

While this technology is still in the experimental stage, the potential impact for the airline industry and the environment is obvious. Airline emissions pose a major environmental threat, and G8 leaders have called for a 50 percent reduction in airline emissions by 2050. That’s a tall order, but it looks like the Swiss have shown the way forward. Of course the Solar Impulse’s slow speed and small cockpit mean the age of solar-powered 747s is a long way off, think of it as the modern equivalent of the Wright Brothers plane. It was only a generation after Kitty Hawk that passengers started flying to international destinations.

What’s your travel laptop?

by Grant Martin on

With my professional and personal careers both on the move, I have recently discovered the virtues of traveling with a laptop. I hate burning three hours in a random airport terminal with nothing to do when I could be blogging, writing grants or at the very least playing old-school video games. That’s why I’ve invested in a decent, small notebook, capable of running on batteries for 3-4 hours at a time and fulfilling my basic internet/office/DOS needs.

If you’re thinking of investing this year, check out Laptop Magazine’s Top 10 Notebooks of 2007, where the best units in a variety of categories are detailed. While the uber-media-ultra-expensive hepta-core Dell XPS blasto-station might not be up your alley, a variety of budget and portable laptops caught my eye and should be great for the savvy traveler.

My weapon of choice? The Thinkpad X31 running Ubuntu 7.04. Small, secure, fairly powerful, integrated wireless and none of the corporate chaff that slows down Windows computers. It’s kind of like the 1984 Mercedes Benz 380D that you converted to bio-diesel of computers, but I’ll tell ya, it’s a workhorse, doesn’t lock up and is chronically virus free.