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TouristEye is basically a an offline trip planner that allows you to plan out your trip, day by day. It includes a trip journal, offline maps, and info on many destinations. This is the type of app you would download if you were traveling, because, lets face it, you don’t want to get to foreign country and then have absolutely no idea where to go what-so-ever. That would just be bad planning.
What is it and what does it do
Main Functionality
As said earlier, TouristEye is a trip planner so if you’re going on a trip, this could be the app you end up using to plan out your trip. Because it works offline, you can take TouristEye with you while on vacation and don’t worry about incurring data charges by using it.
TouristEye has many features that are meant to make it easy to plan out your trip and, for the most part, the process is very straightforward. Even though this app sounds simple, it’s more than just a simple trip planner as you’re about to find out.
Pros
- This app works offline, so if you are in an area without an internet connection, then you’ll still have access to your digital trip planner
- Allows you to look at nearby attractions, cities, towns, and so on
- Creating a trip plan is simple
- Includes a trip journal in which you can add notes and photos
- Includes a built-in map
Cons
- Not optimized for the larger screen of a tablet
- Includes minimal information on destinations
- Can be slow at times (but it isn’t that bad)
- The built-in map that comes with TouristEye is pretty terrible (e.g. it takes forever to load anything with it)
Discussion
TouristEye helps you plan out your next trip, find attractions near your vacation spot, and even display them on a map. These features are available offline, so if you’re in an area without internet connection or in a country where you don’t have a local SIM, you’ll still be able to access this app. If this app didn’t work offline, there would be the chance of getting yourself into some area, such as the mountains, and losing your connection, in which case you could get lost, not know where to go, and get very frustrated.
TouristEye can find attractions, cities, and towns near you. Now this feature sounds all fine and dandy, but the issue is it really gives very limited information on nearby attractions, which is a disappointment. Think about it this way. Let’s say you’re on a trip, and you’re in some city you’ve never been in before; you want to find something to do, or a place to go. Sure you might be able to find places to go to using TouristEye, but if you want to learn more about them prior to visiting them, TouristEye really doesn’t help there. There also seems to be holes in TouristEye’s location database. In my testing, I found that TouristEye had a hard time finding places like restaurants.
The one good thing about this app is creating a trip plan is actually a simple process. First you choose the length of your trip, then after that you create your itinerary from which you can add the cities you want to visit on a given day. In this regard, it would be nice to see an option to add more than just cities to this itinerary, since I would like to plan out what I would like to do in that city — and what if I want to stop somewhere outside of a city?
TouristEye includes a trip journal which you can add photos and note to. This is a nice feature, but the one thing I would like to see added to TouristEye here is the option to add video, because, chances are, your going to take a few videos while you’re on your trip.
Moving along, TouristEye includes a built-in map, which could’ve been a very useful tool, but, in my case, wasn’t that useful since it really didn’t load much of anything. When it does load, it is very laggy and takes forever to load the map. This is something that was frustrating to me, and it would’ve been even more frustrating if I had actually been on a trip somewhere. This is something that really turned me off completely from this app.
Finally, TouristEye also has a bookings tab. but to be able to use it you need to pay for an account. You have three options when it comes to an account.
- Pro Trip: $1.99
- Annual Account: $9.99 until Oct 31/12 Regular price: $20.00
- Platinum Account: $69.99
Conclusion and download link
TouristEye has a lot of potential, and with improvements, could be a much better app than it is at the time of me writing this review. If all you intend to use this app for is the trip planner, then this app will work perfectly for your needs. However, if you need to use any of the other features, such as the maps or location finder feature, this app is a terrible choice for you. Google Maps does a much better job of not only providing an excellent mapping services but also is better at finding nearby destinations and giving you more detail on the locations than TouristEye.
In the end, there really is no way I could recommend this app to anyone in its current state. It just seems that most of the features in TouristEye are incomplete. As I said, it has potential but there is work to be done.
Price: Free
Version reviewed: 2.0.15
Requires:Android 2.1 or higher
Download size: 4.3 MB
