An electronic travel guide is something I dreamed for years. This is a potential killer-app for the iPhone, but the Lonely Planet Hong Kong Guide shows that we are not there yet. Good content is let down by an unpolished interface.
The biggest selling point for me would have been the map functionality enhanced by the iPhone's built in GPS and compass. Unfortunately, the map function has many frustrations. Firstly,every time you open the map, it forgets the last view you were on. Thus the switching between the text and the map (more on this below) is an exercise in frustration. This wouldn't be too so annoying if the locate-me function was a bit more robust (perhaps a hardware issue). Also annoying is that the map is not searchable by street name. When looking for a street, I ended up grabbing a free paper map as it was bigger and easier to scan over. Also, the map is either incomplete or not up-to-date. My hotel (Novotel on Nathan Road) was not in the guide. I wasn't even to overcome this by adding my own marker to the map: custom waypoints isn't a supported feature.
The text content is great as it is taken directly from Lonely Planet's reputable guide book. Unfortunately it doesn't exploit of any of the advantages of an electronic interface. The index is a list of all the item and sub-items - Getting Started, Background, Neighbours etc. Unfortunately each sub-section is not collapsible, so it takes a minute scrolling to get to down to the section you are interested in. Searching doesn't help either: typing in the name of the region "Kowloon" results in multiple entries all saying "Kowloon" - only by tapping on one and going back can you find out which one is "accommodation" and which one is "eating".
The text pages themselves are then frustratingly devoid of hyperlinks. There are no links from one page to another beyond previous/next buttons. Worst of all, there are almost no links to the map and, as mentioned above, jumping between the map and the text is an exercise in hair-pulling frustration
The price is cheaper than the equivalent dead-tree edition and an electronic version had the potential to be superior to a physical version. Sadly, with the software limitations, I found myself using a paper map and wishing that I'd just shelled out the extra money for the book edition. I'll keep an eye on this class of apps though as the limitations will hopefully be overcome in future versions.
