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Google reportedly halts print editions of Frommer's guidebooks
Were we really expecting a different outcome? Several months after Google bought Frommer's to bolster its location efforts, Skift hears that the iconic travel guide maker has completely stopped publication of print editions as its focus swings to the online realm. Authors say that many of their scheduled Frommer's books now won't be published; a few say their contracts were simply delayed, but the usual raft of guides that would show at this time of year just haven't materialized. We've reached out to Google to confirm what's going on, although the writing may have been on the wall when the bookstore disappeared from the Frommer's site in September. If true, many travelers will have to either switch to rival guides or use Google's digital parallels to learn what's interesting in a strange new land. [Image credit: Caitlin Regan, Flickr]
Triposo is a worthwhile travel guide to everywhere
If you travel a lot, Triposo (free, universal) is a great addition to your app arsenal. Triposo has guides for pretty much everywhere, even out-of-the-way places for US travelers like Afghanistan, Chad, Latvia and Zambia to name just a few. In addition to country guides, there are city guides for most of the bigger cities around the world. The app is basically a shell for region-specific data you download while planning your trip. Once it is downloaded, you don't need an online connection to use it. The guide gives you an overview of the destination, along with detailed maps of its largest cities. The app includes a currency converter, weather and some useful phrases. In big cities, you get restaurant guides and suggestions for nighttime entertainment. %Gallery-178756% I downloaded the Arizona info. It was 50 megabytes, and reasonably complete, with lots of suggestions for outdoor activities. There was usually a brief description of the location, and often some info culled from Wikipedia. The only city with great detail was Phoenix, but the app showed hundreds of places to go all around the state. As you venture outside the large cities, the maps lose detail. Triposo is a really useful app, and a nice partner to the Crash City Guides that I looked at a few days ago. The only negative I found for Triposo is that while the app will show your destination on a map, there are no directions to get there. A lot of apps will link to Google or Apple Maps, making navigation easy. That's a pretty significant weakness of Triposo, and one I hope to see fixed soon. Having said that, Triposo can get you information on just about anywhere in the world, and that makes it unique for something you can carry in your pocket. If you travel, you're sure to find it valuable, and I recommend it. Triposo is a universal app and is optimized for the iPhone 5. It requires iOS 5 or greater.
mTrip's travel guide apps are free this week
mTrip has just told us that the company will make 17 of its most popular iPhone travel guide apps free this Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Five travel guides will be available for free today (normally US$5.99), and six others over the next two days. Here's what cities you can grab on what day: Tuesday, December 18 (today) Paris Amsterdam Vienna Tokyo Budapest Wednesday, December 19 London Berlin Madrid San Francisco Dublin Shanghai Thursday, December 20 New York Barcelona Rome Istanbul Singapore Prague All of mTrip's free (and paid) travel guide apps can be downloaded in the App Store here. Happy travels!
Inkling releases Frommer's travel guides for iPhone and iPad
Frommer's and Inkling have teamed up to bring the popular series of travel guides to the iPad and the iPhone, says a report in Paid Content. The interactive titles will feature retina-optimized photographs, interactive tours, maps, notebooks, and real-time weather. Users will also be able to share notes and sync itineraries between devices. The series will launch with seven titles covering Costa Rica, France, Alaska, California, Japan, Spain and Great Britain. Additional locations will roll out by the end of the year. The interactive apps are available from US$9.99 to $14.99, deepening on the geographic area covered by the guide.
mTrip offers free iPhone travel guides
For any of our readers planning to take a trip you'll want to check out the list below to see if your destination city is there. For this week only, mTrip is offering its popular iPhone travel guides for free. Different guides are available for free each day of the week. All of mTrip's travel guide apps are usually $5.99, so be sure to grab them for free while you can! The giveaway is in celebration of mTrip's new social sharing features, which allows users to share photos, reviews, and more with their friends through mtrip.me. The schedule: Tuesday, September 6: Paris Amsterdam Vienna Tokyo Budapest Wednesday, September 7: London Berlin San Francisco Madrid Dublin Shanghai Thursday, September 8: New York Rome Istanbul Singapore Prague Friday, September 9: Barcelona Venice Hong Kong Munich Stockholm
Non-Game Boy: Serious games before they were cool
Since the release of Brain Age in Japan, Nintendo has turned their attention toward casual, nontraditional fare for adult audiences. Much of it, like Brain Age, is casual game material with a slight educational slant, but other successful DS releases, like Cooking Navi and Eigo Zuke, are not games at all, but rather educational aids and tools designed to use the DS's unique interface. They're all doing massive business, which makes it difficult to laugh at them no matter how silly they are. But Nintendo was not the first company to attempt to sell application software on a gaming system, however. That distinction probably falls on BASIC Programming for the Atari 2600. Nintendo wasn't even the first company to sell application software on a Nintendo handheld. In fact, Game Boy non-games appeared in 1991. They didn't change the face of gaming. But they make for an interesting historical footnote now, and isn't that better than selling millions of copies? It is for us!
