Going on a business trip or vacation to a new or even previously visited city, I want (if there is time) to see interesting places, try local food and generally feel the spirit of the new space. The best option to do this is probably to take and live in the city, which will suit few. Another correct way is friends and acquaintances in a new place who are ready to show and tell everything. Finally, the most obvious and easiest way is a travel guide. Of course, there are still various Internet sites with reviews and impressions of different people, but, in fact, these are the same guidebooks, just in a different format. Three or four years ago, a paper guidebook was one of the few available and proven ways to read about a new place and collect useful information before a trip, but with the development of the Internet, the appearance of various articles and reviews of travelers, a paradox, paper guidebooks did not become more accessible, but on the contrary, have increased greatly in price. Now some not the most 'chubby' guidebook of the Afisha publishing house costs about 700-800 rubles, but about books by foreign publishers (Lonely Planet, National Geographic, Rough Guides, Wallpaper on Phaidon and others) I don't even want to stutter, there prices start from 1,000 rubles. But there are still smartphones!
It was with these thoughts that I went to Google Play to look for quality travel guides. I spent several hours on this lesson, downloading everything from the TOP and studying at least fluently (sometimes you run the program, and it is immediately clear that it is better to delete it), and made disappointing conclusions – there is nothing good about traveling for Android .
Of the more or less sane, I can name only one application – Afisha-Mir from Rambler, it has a breakdown by country and city, and when you open the city you are interested in, you see not the usual articles on the topic, but a list of questions of the form ' What to ride? ',' Where to eat? ',' Where to live? ',' What to do? ',' What better not to do? ' and then the answers to them, first from the editorial staff of the publishing house, and then from users (site visitors, apparently). The format, in fact, is convenient, it's a pity that there is no general system there, that is, for one city there can be 1000 councils, and for another – 10. Plus a non-standard format, as I already noted, as well as the ability to download all these notes to your smartphone and use them offline.
In fact, the situation turned out to be strange. To be honest, I was sure that there are cool guidebooks for smartphones for a long time with offline maps, the ability to add your own notes and your places with comments and photos, as well as other chips, but I did not find anything like that. Yes, you can always rely on Trip Advisor in an unfamiliar city if you don't know where to go, where to stay, and what to eat. The service is very popular, it contains hundreds of reviews for literally every more or less relevant place, besides, you can download all the information about a particular city and use it offline, and the application itself and all the content in it are completely free.
But this, you see, is somehow not enough to compete with expensive paper guidebooks. Personally, I like the travel guides of the Afisha publishing house, but I don't find anything close to the same on Google Play. Maybe you can tell me? Do you use any electronic guides and where do you get them?
