HearPlanet is an idea which is truly excellent and can only expand. The idea is that you are travelling in a strange place your iPhone or your iPod Touch becomes your instant guide. If your machine has GPS built in it can pretty much be totally automatic.

At the moment it is free which is a good price so you should try to download it as soon as possible.
What you get is a personal guide which you can read or, more amazing still, it can read the information to you.

With a 3G iPhone you can use the location services and HearPlanet will figure out precisely where you are. And then let you know what things of interest are around you.

(This would appear to be an infinitely expandable application. When it can tell you all about Caerwys in Wales it will probably have reached capacity. Or perhaps Mudgee in Australia.)

HearPlant tells you about museums (possibly so that you can avoid them), stadiums, zoos, landmarks and popular attractions. Plainly this has just started and some of the entries are very short. Not to the point of being worthless but pretty close. Others are quite detailed.

So far it only has 230,000 locations and they are not, all Gods be thanked, confined to the United States.

When HearPlanet stops being free it will cost US$3.99 which is a very good price.

It is totally integrated as an iPhone/iPod Touch application. Tap the play button HearPlanet switches you to speaker mode so you can share the information although you may prefer the privacy of your headphones.

Where did all the information come from? HearPlanet could hardly have sent squads of reporters to the far corners of the earth to get the good oil. In fact, it is from Wikipedia which is properly credited.

This is nowhere near as far as it can go. It is not yet linked in to Google Maps and it gives no phone numbers although one could make a good case for not entering those.

HearPlanet is a simple but smart app with a nice look and feel. Eventually integration with maps and phone numbers would be a great addition. At the moment it is free but even when it becomes chargeable it is still fantastic value for money. Especially if you are a perpetually perambulating reptile of the press.

Related:

iPhone and iPod Touch rule the world — sort of and for the moment

Review – Yelp for the iPhone / Touch

Top 40 best free iPod Touch Apps

Apple will defend the iPhone

Apple changes stance on ‘free’ app upgrades

Entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 3:53 pm under Free Apps, iPhone, iPod Touch.  Print This Post

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