Hasta La Gadget!

The Lonely Planet guide is an iPhone travel guide done right. It takes everything from the original dead-tree guide and squeezes it into an iPhone (or iPod Touch) sized package. Better still, it does adds some things that are impossible to do in an old-fashioned paper edition.

Lonely Planet guides are, like any other travel guide, great if you want to be eating, sleeping and visiting in the same places as everyone else. You’ll find advice on restaurants, bars, gay and lesbian hangouts, shopping and everything else, and it’s all replicated here.

There are some advantages to having an electronic version. First, you won’t look quite so much like a tourist — staring at your iPhone will make you look like any other local. Toting a map and guidebook, on the other hand, marks you out as a target. And because the iPhone knows where you are, there’s no wandering around looking for street signs and then wading through indexes. Just like Google Maps on the iPhone, your location is pinpointed. All of the actual streetmaps are stored on the device, too, which means that you don’t need an internet connection — or even an iPhone: this works great on the Touch, too.

You can either browse maps or just hit the “Nearby” button and be given a list of everything in the surrounding streets. As you can see from the picture, it even works here in Barcelona, although everything is over 6000 kilometers away.

One quirk of this system is that you can’t access the restaurant and bar listings through the actual sections in the book, whether by kind of food or by neighborhood. Instead you have to use the map. It’s a shame. While a paper book can’t spare space to print everything twice, there is no such restriction in an application.

You can save favorites, too, which is the equivalent of folding the corners on pages, or you can browse through like a normal book, page by page, section by section, just by swiping your fingers. And a very handy extra is the search function. It will bring up anything listed in the book, but sadly you can’t search on addresses.

I’ll be trying it out in New York over the next week, and I’ll let you know how it goes. The Application cost me €13 ($16 in the US store). That’s cheaper than the paper book, and a lot more handy. You can also get guides for many other major and minor cities, and if you want to check things out first, the San Francisco guide is actually free during the WWDC. I guess those Californian hippies won’t pay for anything.

Product page [iTunes]

The 12-inch HP Pavilion dv2 is designed to bridge (and exploit) the gap between netbooks and standard laptops. Its $750 price is true to that credo, though full-fledged budget laptops have been edging down into that space.

The dv2 is lightweight, it’s thin, and it’s billed by HP as a non-netbook–the first laptop to run AMD’s Neo processor. (The Neo is somewhat more powerful than the ubiquitous Intel Atom netbook processor, though still markedly inferior to even an Intel Core 2 Duo processor.) It has a 92%-sized keyboard and lacks a built-in optical drive, though it ships with an external drive. The dv2 does have discrete graphics and 4GB of RAM. Does it have enough going for it to pass muster?

If you ever want to get on airplane, you should probably not carry around these suitcases.

An artist in France has created a line of boxy luggage that uses toy weapons for decoration. It appears that the ‘weapons’ are cut sideways, stuck on the bag’s side, and then painted over to appear as if they’re jutting out from the case itself.

As can be seen in her website, the self-styled ‘hippie girl’ artist is trying to make a point about the apparent social behavior present in the current climate of fear when traveling. Mainly, that some people might only appear to be more threatening than others based on a physical perception.

She also believes these suitcases will foster a healthy, open conversation between strangers.

Here’s one possible convo: "Hey! You’re the one with that ‘Ax suitcase.’ Just wanted to say thanks. Without you, we would have left the tarmac by now. Instead, this five-hour postponement has made me realize how much I hate traveling and attention-getting fools like you. Thanks a lot, man."

You can buy the suitcase right here, for about $125, or you can email the artist through her site, where you can request a specific color/weapon combo.

Before I leave for a long-overdue vacation in Europe, I’m going to get my iPhone in travel-ready condition. Read on to find out how.

I’ve been anticipating this vacation for a long time. But in my planning, there was just one thing I wasn’t looking forward to: Doing without my iPhone, even if only for 10 days. After a year and a half of integrating the device into my lifestyle, I decided it just wasn’t worth it. 

Now, before you judge me as a tech-dependent freak, allow me to explain: I’m going to Paris and London — two cities where an iPhone could certainly be useful just to find my way around (as opposed to lugging around travel books). If I were going somewhere like India, where an iPhone would disturb my spiritual journey toward self-discovery, then yes, I would more than happily leave the Jesus phone at home. But given the circumstances, my iPhone’s coming with me.

Sure, I could just enable the iPhone’s data roaming feature, but I don’t want to come back home with a $2,100 bill from AT&T. To roam internationally without breaking the bank, you need to take a few steps before you go: unlock and jailbreak the phone, get a pay-as-you-go SIM card that will work in the country you’ll be visiting, and preload your iPhone with useful travel apps.

Here’s a guide on what you need to do to travel with your iPhone to Europe — followed by some applications that should be helpful for your trip.

1. Jailbreak and unlock your iPhone

Before you get on the plane, you need to both hack and unlock your iPhone. (Note: Jailbreaking is not illegal, although Apple is trying to make it so.)
Otherwise, you’ll end up sticking in an international SIM card, only to
be greeted with the "Invalid SIM" message. (Or if you’re on AT&T and you opt for an international roaming plan, you’ll likely end up paying more than your plane tickets just to use your iPhone.)

To clarify, I own a first-generation iPhone. And I’ve never felt better
about not upgrading, because unlocking the iPhone 3G to work overseas,
according to my peers, is a nightmare, including the complicated unlock
process and the humongous 3G data fees. On the other hand, the unlock
process for the first-generation iPhone is extremely easy and reliable, and I can get by with cheaper 2G data services.

To simultaneously unlock and Jailbreak my original iPhone, I followed a very clear, intuitive tutorial at HackThatPhone.
It took about 45 minutes to perform. In summary, the process involved
downloading software called PwnageTool and configuring it to build
custom firmware to manipulate the iPhone into working with other
carriers. (I can’t wait to get away from AT&T’s shoddy service.)

2. Find a pre-paid SIM card

Orange has the best data plan in Europe for 9€ ($11) a month unlimited; for calls you can opt for a pay-as-you-go plan. That sounds great for me, because I’d only make calls for an emergency, and for data I don’t want to get charged up the wazoo when I’m looking up maps and subway schedules.

The best, cheapest way to score a SIM? Craigslist, says my tech journalist colleague Cyrus Farivar, who currently lives in France. Otherwise, a SIM brand new costs about 20€ ($25). I’ll be checking Craigslist periodically, but if that doesn’t work out in the next week I’ll just order a new one.

3. Download travel apps
Here’s the most fun part — downloading apps for your trip. Here are the ones I dug up:

Currency (free): Obviously, a calculator that does currency conversions for you.

London Tube ($1): An app that displays a map of the London Tube, as well as Subway line routes and directions to stations.

Metro Paris ($1): An app that displays a map of the Paris Metro, as well as the line routes and directions to stations.

Pano ($3): An app that works with your iPhone camera to create panoramas. (See an earlier review of Pano from Wired.com’s Michael Calore.)

Cycorder (free, for Jailbroken iPhones only): An unauthorized video recorder for iPhone.

Any more tips from other Euro-bound iPhone users out there? Let us know in the comments below.

Photos: Kalleboo/Flickr, jorgeq/Flickr

GiSTEQ — the GPS phototagger folks — are back on the scene with TripBook, a novel approach to the art of mileage tracking. The idea is simple: You plug the device into your vehicle’s lighter, at which point it powers up and preserves all the sordid details of your journey — time, distance, route and so forth. Once your saga concludes (or, as Joseph Campbell once put it, when you return “to the world of common day”) the data can be exported to your PC (sorry, Mac users) for creating IRS-compliant mileage reports. The device, vehicle adapter, USB cable and all pertinent software and manuals are available from the manufacturer for $99.

Filed under: GPS

GiSTEQ USB dongle makes trip logging quick, easy, and utterly heroic originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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