With SXSW in full swing and digital execs planning for CTIA, there has probably never been a greater flurry of activity around location-based apps and mobile travel planners. If finding something interesting to do in Orlando were not hard enough already, try figuring out which app to choose to optimize your partying schedule in Austin. Looking at all those lines outside the crucial events (never mind the ones inside), choosing the wrong conference networking app could be a career-threatening decision.

So now seems an appropriate time to take a sweep of what’s available. And I mean ‘sweep’, because given the volume of choice, there is a wide surface to be scratched with plenty requiring a quick brush aside. Riverphonic’s exhaustive annual 200-page “Everything You Need to Know about All the LBS Apps that Matter”, this is not. (But do watch this space).

For starters, we need to break things down into emerging categories, because the app stores have not gotten around to it yet. On the iPhone app store in USA, at time of writing, searching under ‘Travel’ will return – sharp intake of breath – 13557 paid and 5461 free apps. These can further be filtered according to Name, What’s Hot and Featured, but still, it remains a crazy mélange of competing travel guides, phrasebooks, journey trackers, entertainment listings, local services etc. where an illustrious brand like National Geographic could be jostling for position with a New Orleans cab directory. From the sublime to the ridiculous, Shanghai road traffic patterns look like a July 4th parade in comparison. [Editor’s note: if I get through this article without using the words Plethora, Myriad and It’s a Jungle out there baby, I’ll feel like I’ve done a good days work.]  Alternatively, one could turn to those nice people at Google. The Android market at least divides the apps into Travel & Local and Transportation, but following that the navigation becomes weirdly dysfunctional. App publishers are subject to the old death by page ranking syndrome: for example NDrive Italy app ($27.87) is buried on page 16, and only 10 pages are clickable from the first page. Of course both stores have a Search Bar, but this is what one might call Assumptive rather than Predictive, in that it assumes you already know what you are looking for.

A sub-menu would really help here, with Travel apps falling into categories such as (i) What’s On, for local listings and events delivered on a real-time, Need-It-Now basis. Honor roll would include UrbanDaddy, Blackbook, Time Out, Yelp, Geodelic, Urbanspoon, Zagat2Go, Around Me, Where, Smart City, Thrillist, Travel in 10 and City Guides. (The search bar in Getjar’s app store, representing what one might call ‘the indies’, returns 0 results for “What’s On”. Hot apps like these can be found in Lifestyle/Local Events, fyi). Each has its own recommendation engine with a slanted level of filtering to suit the reader. Determining which app works for you depends not just on the editorial style, but on your appetite for choice and the degree to which you want a smorgasbord or just a single refined option.

(ii) Travel Guides, for the less time-sensitive data on places of interest, historical info and directions that can be consumed before as well as during the experience. This is the traditional preserve of publishers like Lonely Planet and Conde Nast, who are all rocking out with cool stuff on the iPad. To these could be added Mtrips, Travel Guide, American Express, Rough Guides, Keen Guides, FidesReef, Park Guides, Best of, and urWorld, to name a few. Again, differentiation depends to some degree on the level of personalization, however the grade of design and the richness of content play a bigger part than in the What’s On category, where it is more a case of aggregating online listings and layering on a judgment call for the ADHD crowd.

(iii) Orientation – whether of an urban, globe-trotting or hitting-the-trail nature. Most of these apps allow the user to check-in, log and share information with a select group of like-minded users, and there is often some game mechanic involved. So while at first glance they may appeal to different mindsets, there’s a lot in common among the likes of Foursquare, Svngr, Gowalla, Buzzd, Rummble, Loopt and Whrrl, and Every Trail, Louis Vuitton’s celebrity Amble, and just about every audio tour ever made that is currently being reformatted for mobile. Apps reliant on UGC such as UGuideMe clearly suffer from the old chicken/egg ‘empty room syndrome’ of being worthless until they garner enough users to populate the app with anything interesting to read. One solution is to syndicate in listings from other sources, allowing some of these apps to compete with the listings specialist What’s On apps. The jury is still out as to whether user comments mixed in with generic info will win out over more expertly curated reviews.

The level of interaction increases with Utilities (iv), a group dominated by a tighter selection of apps that have really got to grips with what users are looking for. Tripit, Flight Tracker and Skyscanner all seem to do a better job of helping the traveler organize itineraries than anything the individual airlines have come up with yet. Along with all the phrasebooks (which may have a limited lifespan once Google’s voice recognition and translation technologies start cranking), the XE currency converter and the Tipper tip calculator should keep you out of trouble, Terminator and AntiDroidTheft could come in handy if your pocket is picked in, say, Barcelona, but we still await the app that teaches manners to Parisian waiters.

Augmented Reality almost deserves a section unto itself, but as the name suggests it’s ultimately an enhancement of apps in other categories. The ability to scan the view with the camera and overlay it with points of interest, introduced by the likes of Monocle from Yelp and Conde Nast Traveler, now seems commonplace. Props should go to the Museum of London’s StreetMuseum app which superimposes historical prints onto famous sites in the capital. Nothing short of brilliant! Commercial interests will soon be leveraging this technology for the full Minority Report effect in (v) Local Services, our final, teeming category that goes far beyond the municipal, such as Beijing Taxi and Kyoto Bus schedules, to an impressively granular depth of entrepreneurial marketing. The aforementioned Geodelic is designed so local businesses can white-label it to run their own local listings app. If there is any residual doubt among the mobile Luddites that apps are the new format to be reckoned with, they should look no further than the UK’s iPhone app store Travel section, where A1 Cars from Liverpool and A&B Taxis from Basildon both realized it was worth developing an app because having an icon on the home screen acts like a hot button; the distant Orkney Isles have their own destination app; and – not to be outdone – even the good folk of Kettlewell Village are standing up to be counted.

Verily, tis a Yorkshire dale out there.