My new little handheld, the HP iPaq 4355, made it possible, with just a couple of exceptions, for us to navigate Paris like natives.
Without good maps, you can waste a lot of travel time stumbling through streets and climbing onto the wrong subway trains. We didn’t spend a penny on Metro, the ultimate public transport guide for Palm/Pocket PC computers … but it saved us tons of time as we made ou way from point to point.
Metro is available for a number of world cities (Paris, New York, and many others). It works like this: you put in the subway station where you are, plus the subway station where you want to be. Metro takes everything from closed stations to time of day into account, then provides both the shortest route and the route with the fewest train changes (the two are not always the same thing).
This remarkable FREE program not only provides step-by-step directions from station to station … it also allows you to put in attraction names (like Eiffel Tower). The result? We zipped from the Musee D’Orsay to the Eiffel Tower in record time.
TUBE software also proved useful. Also available for a range of world cities, TUBE delivers functionality similar to Metro, but adds animated subway maps and incredible street-level maps, to boot.
The downside? TUBE works exclusively with station names — you can’t tell it “I want to go to the Louvre.” Also, its street maps, while very accurate, are not interactive (you can’t say, “I’m here, and I want to go here … take me there!”).
TUBE also costs twenty bucks.
The two programs work well together: we depended on Metro for point-to-point travel between sites, and TUBE’s excellent street-level maps. With only one or two minor snafus, we found our way from A to B more easily than we ever have.
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