Hg2: A Hedonist’s Guide | iPhone app review | GlobetrotterGirls Travel

Hg2: A Hedonist’s Guide | iPhone app review

Posted on 10. Jul, 2011 by jess in Destinations, Europe, Product Reviews, Travel Technology, Travel Tips

During our three-month jaunt in Europe this spring, in addition to researching fellow travel blogs and peeking into the usual Lonely Planet or Footprint guide, we decided to employ the help of the Hg2 iPhone app for a more well-rounded look at Europe’s major cities.

A hedonist, according to dictionary.com, is ‘a person whose life is devoted to the pursuit of pleasure and self-gratification’. As full-time travelers enjoying every minute, we tend to fall into this category, regardless of our somewhat restricted travel budget. In fact, we consider ours not a tight budget but a smart budget, spending money where it counts and keeping it low everywhere else. Both in paperback and iPhone app form, the Hedonist city guides promise ‘independent advice for intelligent travelers’ and the app provides a wealth of information at a much lower price than buying each of the Hedonist guides individually.

For £9.99, the guides cover 41 cities from Miami, New York and L.A and European cities like Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Berlin, to Tokyo and Beijing, Dubai and Damascus. We primarily used the Hg2 guide app in Madrid, Milan and most of all during our three-week stint in Lisbon.

Each city guide is broken down by Hotels, Restaurants, Cafes, Bars, Clubs, Shopping, Sights and Things to Do. The last two, sights and things to do, are great even for travelers on a tight budget, as they highlight not only the city’s main tourist attractions but also provide inspiring ideas on ways of seeing the town. For example, the Lisbon ‘Things to Do’ section breaks down the best cycling locations, where to rent bikes, tips on free bike rental locations in Cascais and contact to mountain biking and trekking tour companies. After trolling through the Lisbon listings on the plane over from Madrid, by the time we landed I felt I had a good feel for the city and its neighborhoods, and had even made headway on completing a rough itinerary.

The Hg2 guides also appear to be very trustworthy. Popular restaurants or cafes don’t always serve up quality food, for example, and the Hg2 city guide wasn’t afraid to let users know that. Similarly, if a hotel is part of the city ‘scene’ but its rooms are a bit stuffy, the guide tells you this as well. This doesn’t differ from the offline version of the Hg2 guides, and just like in print, the iPhone app is well-researched and has loads of information for the best quality spots in cities worldwide.

In addition to great info, the ‘Favourites’ lists and an ‘Add to your Itinerary’ section allow users to organize their information to better plan each city break. Within each city guide, you can also check in with foursquare, look at all locations on a city map and glance at a ‘soundtrack to your city’ iTunes music listing. The ‘Augmented View’ element allows users to hold the phone up to important buildings or other locations and identify in real time what each structure, which comes with an informative blurb as well.

However, as with all travel guide apps, I have an issue with anything that requires use of the internet. What good is the augmented reality feature or the map option for travelers without an unlocked iPhone outside their home country? With no 3G internet access, iPhone users can only use wi-fi to access the internet, meaning we can’t look these things up online on the go. Unless you are connected to wi-fi (and therefore already in another location, usually indoors), these extra goodies are fairly irrelevant.Luckily, only the extras require internet, the guides themselves are full and complete offline.

The app is also a bit clunky. There is no linking from one hotel to the next within the hotel section, meaning that when you are looking for a hotel in Madrid, you have to tap ‘Madrid’, then ‘Hotels’ then choose a hotel, then read a review, look at it on the map, check-in or add to favs. Now, let’s say you read a review and want to go to the next hotel. You have to tap ‘back’ out of the review, ‘back’ out of that particular hotel, and then ‘back’ into the hotel listing and on to the next hotel, and one more time on the review section. This made browsing Madrid hotels a more time consuming process than if you could go from one informative hotel review to the next without at least 5 steps in between.

The last nitpicky downer to the app is the ‘Soundtrack to Your City’ component, which while unique, is useless unless app users are looking to purchase music on iTunes. Click on any one song in the soundtrack list (mostly well-known pop, but some funkier and traditional songs as well), and you are immediately taken out of the app, into iTunes, where you can purchase that one song or, conveniently, the artist’s entire album. If the app were free and had this sort of iTunes sales tool it would be justifiable, but paying for an app should mean no ads, and no product purchase pressure once inside the app.

Overall, the Hg2 iPhone app is a well-researched inside look at each of the 41 cities, with tips compiled by actual residents of the city. The fact that all of the high-quality information is fully accessible offline is an important aspect of the app, and makes it super useful.

While savvy techno-travelers don’t rely on just one guide to get around, the Hg2 app is an excellent, on-the-go source of info on the world’s major metropoles and is an excellent addition to any travel app collection.