Frommer’s makes a popular line of travel books for various destinations. And now the company is offering a free iPhone app for travelers. It doesn’t quite make a good guide book obsolete. But it’s much easier to fit in your pocket, and offers a number of features that could come in handy for domestic and international travel, including:
- A tip calculator
- Currency converter with 170 currencies updated daily
- Unit converter for distances, weight, volume, and temperatures
- Global time clock which lets you convert time from one location to another
- Flashlight app which stays lit for up to 30 minutes
- Travel Trivia
- Packing list
You can also send virtual postcards by adding notes to a photo from your camera or from a set of pictures from Frommer’s. You can send the postcards over email Twitter, or Facebook.
The app also offers “City Guides” for 50 locations including New York, Paris, Hong Kong, and Amsterdam. But the guides are basically links to the Frommer’s web site and prompts to buy Frommer’s travel books.
The company also offers a series of guide apps with detailed information for individual cities — but these tend to run $4.99 each while the Frommer’s Travel Tools app is available as a free download from the App Store.
More screenshots after the break.
via Gizmodo
I didn’t actually feel like whipping out a credit card, but the idea sounds cool.
note to Offbeat Guides: I’d be a lot more inclined to pay if you had a sample pdf available to peruse. Perhaps paint a picture of a customer, and then show his customized guide to San Francisco in August or something.
That said, I’m not sure how much more value there really is to using this versus a good map, *maybe* a lonely planet book, and google, plus picking up the free newspaper in whatever town you’re in for info about current events and local businesses.