Traveling to Paris with the iPhone
Dan Mauney / Consumer Products / Mobile / TrendsI am a relatively new user to the iPhone, having just purchased one this summer. I bought the iPhone primarily on the promise of 3rd party applications making my life easier. Switching to AT&T from Verizon was difficult because the network coverage of Verizon is so much better where I live and travel, but I was ready to make use of these 3rd party Internet-enabled applications to improve my life.
All-in-all, the iPhone has delivered on that promise. Nothing demonstrated that better than a recent trip to Paris. I have done a bit of international travel, but this was to be my first time to France. France is famous for not wanting to speak English to tourists and I don’t know a lick of French and I was traveling alone, so I did more than my usual preparations for this trip.
The best thing I did, though, was to take my iPhone and to find 3rd Party apps that would be useful. After calling AT&T and purchasing an international data plan for one month, I downloaded a number of great applications to help me get around.
Metro Paris – this one was perhaps my favorite. It contained a map of all the metro stations, their names, and schedules. It also determined the best route to get from one station to another. I was able to get around to just about anywhere in Paris on the Metro
Paris – This is an offline map of Paris. It contains names of the main roads and names of all the Metro stations superimposed on the map. Best of all, it was GPS enabled and could plot my location on the map.
Between these two apps, I was able to get around Paris very easily. Using Paris, I could plot where I was and find the nearest Metro station. Once at a Metro station, I could use Metro Paris to get anywhere else in Paris. And, I could do all this without carrying around a map and looking like a tourist the entire time. When I needed greater accuracy or needed to know which direction I was facing, I could use Google Maps. But since that used data and the other apps didn’t, I used Google Maps rarely. With these apps, I never got lost at all and always knew where I was and how to get to anywhere else.
French Pro – This was a great app for translating English into French. It is cleverly laid out to quickly find the French phase you need and even speaks it so you can simply imitate the sounds. It’s not great for learning how to hold a conversation, but it is great for asking a simple question.
With these 3 apps, I had no trouble getting anywhere or asking for anything I needed in Paris. This made my trip to Paris that much more fun and demonstrated the power and value of 3rd party apps when cleverly designed.
Oh yea, it placed phone calls too.
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