March 10, 2005

Electronic city guides: Vindigo, HopStop, Rough Guide

Travel site Gadling is touting the Rough Guide interactive city tourism maps you can buy for $20 per city and download to your PDA. They indeed look pretty nifty with full-color maps and tourist-site info.

While the Rough Guide does indeed make an interactive guide for New York City, I'm still sold on Vindigo's service, which offers not just interactive maps, current restaurant reviews and museum exhibits but it's only $25 a year, or $3.50 a month for an unlimited number of cities. Granted, when I've tried to use it for directions in cities such as London, Los Angeles and San Diego, the resources aren't nearly as comprehensive as in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

If you're coming to New York for the first time and plan on hitting all the tourist spots, the electronic Rough Guide may be the way to go considering Vindigo doesn't tell you the basics on sites such as Central Park, the Empire State Building or Statue of Liberty. But if you need to find the closest inexpensive Thai restaurant, use Vindigo. (They also have a 30-day free trail, vacationers.)

And while I'm on it, another service that's been getting a lot of publicity lately is HopStop, a neat little online guide that claims to give you walking or subway directions from one point to another in New York. When I first wrote about HopStop in November, the guide told me to walk along the Brooklyn Queens Expressway for a couple miles - and indeed HopStop e-mailed to say they were still working out the bugs.

Now the site is indeed improved, though I still find little flaws -- poor route choices, unrecognized streets and missing major landmarks. It promises to add Manhattan bus info by the end of this month. But what troubles me is how many reviews I've seen of the site lately on the Web, on the TV and in print - and not one has mentioned that Vindigo has been doing something similar for years. Vindigo is superior if you want walking-only directions to a location. You tap in your nearest cross street (no need for on-the-go Internet connection to make this work) and choose the restaurant, bar, museum, store or movie theater you want to get to. (They're all listed there, most with reviews.) Vindigo will tell you how to walk there, but not how long it will take. Alternately, it will tell you the subway stations closest to you, and the stations closest to your destination. It's still up to you to figure out which subway to take - so HopStop does have Vindigo beat if you don't know the city's subway system.

Earlier: You can get there from here

March 10, 2005 07:57 AM in Sightsology, Techology, Transportology

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