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In a society where everything is moving to electronic devices, who would want to be caught dead walking down the streets of a major metropolis flipping through Fodor?s Travel Guide? Even without your black socks, sandals, and camera around your neck, the travel guide screams ?tourist?. It does, however, look very natural for someone to be examining the contents of their PDA. Vindigo Studios comes to the rescue with Vindigo 2.0, one of the best applications for those on the go.
Vindigo is a service application for your PDA (Palm, Pocket PC/Window Mobile) that helps you find places to eat, things to do, and many sites of interest for most of the major cities in the United States. The service is customizable, allowing you to download your cities of interest directly to your PDA, and to select what services you wish to receive.
Vindigo Studios began offering Vindigo in 2001, when I first began looking for add-on applications for my Handspring Visor. Even though the numbers of cities were limited at first, the company and cities have grown to a very robust tool for people on the go. I still have my Handspring Visor and Vindigo still works on it. However, since most PDAs are now color, Vindigo has updated the software to take advantage of this feature. It looks a little funky on a black and white hand held, but looks wonderful on my wife?s Tungsten E.
Once you have downloaded the information to your device, you are good to go with the latest movie show times, shopping, restaurants, and museums to name a few. Vindigo will also help you find these places based on your current location.
Here?s how it works:
Once you have downloaded the data to your PDA, you select your location and closest street intersection.
You then tell Vindigo what you are looking for. If you are looking for a place to eat, you press the Food menu. Vindigo allows you to narrow your selection to the type of food you wish to eat (Thai, sushi, Italian, etc.), and then displays the results based on how close the restaurants are to your location.
All locations can further be refined based on these reviews, cost, and distance relative to your present location. If you want more information about a particular eatery, tap on the name, and Vindigo will give you the address, phone number, and even let?s you read a review from many top publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post. If the restaurant has not been reviewed, you can submit your own the next time you hot sync with your computer.
Once you have made your selection, you can tap the Map tab to bring up a map of the city (including the ability to zoom), which gives you a rough idea of how to get there. If you need more specific directions, the Go tab will give you walking directions to your location.
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