Tour guide in your pocket - Golives application on Apple iPhone
March 11, 2010
Often, GPS receivers that come with smartphones are only used for road navigation or saving geographic location information in photos. Travelers, however, have to carry guide books along for their trips if they want to learn anything from sights they see. If you have a modern smartphone, like the Apple iPhone, you might think that there's an app for that. Well, Geolives is a multimedia tour guide application for that.
Geolives-M is a tour guide application for the Apple iPhone. The app can detect its location from the iPhone's built-in GPS receiver. When the app knows where it is, it can display photos and videos of nearby sights, and above all, it can read out loud information about the sights.
Say you are in Paris, and you want to know more about a tall tower in front of you. The Geolives-M application can tell you it is called Eiffel according to the architect who designed it. At the moment, the app can do it in 20 languages. The reader is not a human, but synthesized voice (surprisingly pleasant voice if you check out the video below).
The company behind Geolives-M, Acapela, has made the application available via the iPhone App Store.
Geolives provides a comprehensive product suite for mapping, tracking and for GPS-related information. Other applications, apart from Geolives-M, run on other smartphones as well.
Geolives also include services for PCs that allow travel route tracking, editing of tracks and loading them to the phone, or from the phone to the PC. For instance routeyou.com, provides track information about more than 180 000 hiking routes.
Video: Geolives iPhone application
