Lonely Planet guides are a great way to make sure you spend your vacations sharing hotels and restaurants with cheap, filthy backpacking hippies. And now, in addition to various iPhone city guides, the company has just launched a range of country guides.
If you’re traveling to Italy, Ireland, Australia, France, Spain and Costa Rica and want to find the most tourist-packed parts of the country, the new $10 guides are just the thing. They share content with the paper guidebooks, and also contain offline maps which work with your GPS, requiring no data connection.
I used the New York City guide on a visit a couple of years ago, and it was pretty crashy but got me around just fine. I imagine that things have improved a lot since then.
One rather odd thing regarding the Lonely Planet’s iOS apps in general. The city and country guides, which would really shine on an iPad, are limited to the iPhone (you can of course pixel-double them, too), and yet the translation apps, which really don’t need a big screen, are universal apps.
The new country guides are available now in the App Store.
