Internationalism is one of the main consequences of mass corporatism and globalization, but it has its advantages and disadvantages alike. On the more positive side it has helped facilitate more people traveling on a worldwide level in a more economic and practical way, where in the past this type of luxury was only reserved to the financial elite. With devices like the iPhone you have the ability to tap onto a commercial travel network, even if they do tend to favor wealthier businesses and somewhat undermine the adventurous nature of travel.
Some of these applications are better than others, mainly the ones that avoid using a conventional commercial company and instead trying to focus on bringing as many different travel utilities together in a non-commercial setting. HearPlanet stands out as one of the best of these, focusing on traditional tourism in a non-specific way by providing text and audio tour guides for over 250,000 points-of-interest around the globe. Today, HearPlanet Premium gets a new feature that adds interactive maps to the tour guides along with audio descriptions using human voices.
When you open Hear Planet it first asks if you would like to use the GPS function to identify your location. Once you say “yes” you are given a list of notable travel facilities, tourism locations, and neighboring towns. They give an exact distance from your specific location to the target ones. You can then select one of these locations from the Hear Planet menu and it will give you a basic text overview of the location, and even have an option to listen to an audio track of the text that is available. If you select an entire town you can then hear a whole variety of information, including the history, geography, demographics, education, and even popular trivia. Along with this is a function that allows you to use Google Maps to get real time directions from your location to the target one.
HearPlanet does tend to work best in large urban areas because there are more notable places to go, but it is still fairly useful no matter where you are. The tool that helps you find transit locations, such as airports and train stations, is great on its own. If you are heading out to do a large amount of traveling and sightseeing, then download HearPlanet because there are few free iPhone applications are going to be as useful as this one.
- HearPlanet – Free [app store]
- HearPlanet Premium
– $5.99 [app store]
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