Of the things that I consider to be a trip necessity, the iPhone has to be one of my top picks. While you can use it for phone calls, it also comes in handy finding that place that you wanted to see, but you can't quite seem to figure out where it is. With the right app, you can call a taxi, or book a dinner reservation. You can post pictures of your food, rate sights and dining experiences, and be as social (or as anti-social) as you like. With all this potential, I continue to search for an app that will deliver a well-rounded travel experience.
Going forward, as I make individual trips, I plan on "roadtesting" at least one travel app per trip. Some travel apps are meant for specific uses, and so on some trips, I'll be able to test multiple apps. For Savannah, I chose to test out a couple of apps which will each receive their own write-up. The first one I'll cover is Triposo.
Triposo is essentially an opensource database of places. The website gives an explanation of how things are pulled together, (http://www.triposo.com/about/how-we-do-it/) but here's my brief overview. Triposo essentially scours the web for travel reviews and data, and compiles it into one big database. The resulting listing of places is combined with picture tags and other info to tag places to maps, and voila! That said, now let's dig into details.
Triposo starts by asking you to set up an account. The account setup process is simple. As part of the process, they ask for an email address. I'm not sure whether this will end up with me receiving multiple spam emails or not, but I'm also not sure why they couldn't be content with just a user name and password. Still, this is probably a minor inconvenience at best.
At least initially, the Triposo app is like most other travel planning apps. It groups destinations into different categories (sightseeing, eating out, nightlife, other), and then you can scan through for things that interest you. One benefit of the open-sourcing of information is that I was able to find a few points of interest that I found nowhere else. Once you've found something that you are interested in, you simply save it to your list. This can be done through the app, or, alternatively, you can go to the Triposo site, sign in, and add things via the website. The website organization leaves something to be desired, as I can't figure out how to sort the listings (alphabetically, by general location, or by cuisine/tag, etc.). Unfortunately, this is also where the ugly side of open sourcing comes in as well. I find multiple restaurant listings for the same place (The Olde Pink House and Pink House Restaurant, or Moon River Brewing Company), as well as Tomo-Chi-Chi's Grave Monument included in the restaurant section.
The website gets worse after this - after the main sightseeing, eating out, and nightlife sections, the "Other" section is essentially tags that have been collected from across the web. Clicking on one of them shows you all the places with that tag. This results in tags such as "Chocolate Chip", "Spicy", and "Muffin". And, of course, again, the tags are open-sourced, so the "Bank" tag has a couple of churches listed.
The app itself is somewhat better - items have more categories and you can sort the listings, so there's better opportunities to find specifically what you were looking for, however, the mislisting of items continues. Another minor frustration - the app is for the entire state, and to get it to show your list of saved items, you have to navigate to the specific city you saved them in. As we crossed into South Carolina, the app became worthless as soon as we crossed the South Carolina state line, which is both somewhat understandable, but also a little annoying, given that some of the places we went were only 30 minutes or so from Savannah.
If you're using the app during the planning phase, there is also the possibility of booking your hotel or tours from within the app, which potentially could be a neat feature. I didn't try it on this trip, but maybe in the future. Once you've added places, you can look at the list, and tell the app whether you're "planning", "traveling", "local", or "been here", but I couldn't tell any changes in the functionality or usefulness by changing the status.
The app also allows you to see places on the map, but doesn't allow you to filter by type of sight, which would be a nice feature. If you select a particular spot, you can show it on the map, or in one neat feature, add it to a walk. I also like that it shows aggregate Yelp reviews for a particular location, as well as pretty good descriptions. Once you've visited a location, you can mark it "done", which prompts it to ask you whether you would recommend it, and any tips that you might want to give. This does get a little annoying after a while, but I suppose this is also how they continue to evolve their programs.
As stated before, this is one of two apps that I used on the trip, and we'll talk about the second in the next post. After that, I'll give my final assessment on the winner between the two.
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