Lonely Planet Reinvents the Guidebook with iPhone
Media Release
For Immediate Release:
11 June 2009
Lonely Planet Reinvents the Guidebook
with iPhone City Guides
Lonely Planet today
announced its iPhone City Guides for iPhone and iPod Touch
are now available for sale globally from the iTunes App
Store, providing travellers with easy to use, interactive,
personalised and fully searchable access to the world’s
most popular guidebook content.
“As the needs of
our travellers have changed over the last 35 years, we’ve
adapted our printed guidebook products accordingly, with new
formats, series and destinations. The iPhone heralds a new
class of handheld devices with capabilities that enable a
next generation guidebook,” said Chris Boden, Head of
Wireless & Innovation at Lonely Planet. “We’ve tried
to take advantage of the iPhone’s location awareness, vast
data storage and simple user interface to re-imagine our
city guidebook series to help travellers get to the heart of
some of the world’s most exciting cities from the
convenience of their hip pocket.”
Lonely
Planet’s Audio Phrasebooks were some of the first travel
products available in the App Store and have generated over
300,000 downloads since their launch. “Following the
successful experiment with our audio phrasebooks for iPhone,
we felt a location-based version of our city guides was the
obvious next step - the iPhone was made for great city guide
applications and Lonely Planet makes great City Guides,”
said Boden.
Twenty Lonely Planet City Guides are
currently available, including London, New York, Melbourne,
Dublin, Barcelona, Rome, Tokyo, Paris, Prague, Amsterdam,
San Francisco, Bangkok, Madrid, Miami, Seoul, Dubai, Berlin,
Cape Town, Singapore and Mexico City - with the San
Francisco City Guide offered free for a limited time. “To
celebrate the launch, we wanted to give everyone a chance to
experience our new guides so downloads of the San Francisco
guide are free for a limited time.”
With Lonely
Planet City Guides, the GPS and scrolling touch-screen of
the iPhone and iPod Touch enable travellers to access
dynamic, interactive maps (offline) for plotting itineraries
and current location; hundreds of personally-vetted venues
can be filtered, marked as favourites and keyword located;
detailed chapters on a city’s culture, history, food and
art give the best introduction to the local scene; and
images from Lonely Planet’s award-winning photographers
bring the city to life.
The City Guides have also
been designed for use offline, so travellers can save money
by avoiding international roaming charges.
Lonely
Planet’s City Guides are available for AU $18.99 /
US$15.99 / £9.49 from the iTunes
Store.
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