The iPhone can be very useful when you travel, especially when your airline has an iPhone app. Following up on my reviews of the Fly Delta and Continental Airlines apps, here is a look at the American Airlines app.
The home page of the app gives you access to the key information that you need, such as viewing your upcoming reservations, the ability to check in, the ability to check flight status and flight schedules and the ability to book a flight. On the home page, and just about every other page of the app, you can use your finger to pull down the screen to quickly refresh the contents — an important function for an airline app considering that departure/arrival times and gates can change while you are traveling.
For some options, such the book a flight option, the app simply redirects you to the mobile version of the aa.com website. It's a good mobile website, but you lose the improved interface and other advantages of a native app
When you look at a page for one of your upcoming flights, all of the key information is clearly presented at one time, minimizing the need to tap several buttons to get at what you need. On one page, you see the flight number, departure and arrival gates, your seat, whether it is on time or delayed, estimated time of arrival, and the option to check in or see a boarding pass (in airports that support American Airlines electronic boarding passes). There are two different layouts for this information depending upon what button you press to get there, but both are nicely done:
One feature that I haven't seen on any other airline apps is the ability to give a name to your reservation. For example, if you have multiple meetings in Miami but one is to meet with client ABC and another is to meet with client DEF, you may find it more helpful to identify the flight with a client name instead of just the location.
The American Airlines app also has the ability to show you the seats on your flight, allowing you to see, for example, that there is nobody in the middle seat in your row so that you can keep your fingers crossed that the seat remains open. (On this flight, mine did. Yeah!)
Like other airline apps, the American Airlines app makes it easy to e-mail your itinerary to someone and store a reminder of where you parked your car. Like the Continental app, the American Airlines app also includes a built-in Sudoku app. I honestly don't understand why you would want to play Sudoku from within an airline app instead of using any of the many free or cheap stand-alone apps, but there must be something appealing about this feature that I don't understand for multiple airlines to include it.
If you use an iPad, there is a separate app called American Airlines HD. It only works in portrait mode (which makes sense on an iPhone but seems arbitrarily restrictive on the iPad) and includes all of the features of the iPhone app with a few more tweaks. First, the graphics are updated for the larger iPad screen. Seconds, for the parts of the app that send you to the aa.com website, you see the full website instead of the mobile website. Third, when you use the app to create an electronic boarding pass, the app gives you four versions of the boarding pass, one in each corner of the iPad, so that you can just put the most convenient corner under the scanner.
The American Airlines app is full of useful features. You should definitely download this free app before your next American flight.
Click here for American Airlines for iPhone (free): 
Click here for American Airlines HD for iPad (free):
