Explore Shanghai with Shanghai WOW! iPhone App

Being a regular business traveller, I’ve used plenty of travel apps on my iPhone, but none of them have been anywhere near as useful as the Shanghai city guide I downloaded from Shanghai WOW! I recently had the opportunity to visit Shanghai for the Expo, and got an extra few days to explore the city. I downloaded all the iPhone city guides I could find relating to Shanghai, and I have to say that Shanghai WOW! stood out from the crowd. The main advantage is that it’s a mini version of the website, so you’re effectively carrying around a Shanghai city guide in your pocket. Unlike other Shanghai iPhone city guides which are just bare listings or articles geared towards expats instead of visitors, this one actually has information about each destination, with a bit of historic and cultural detail too. It also shows the entry charge for each place, making it easy Thanks to GPRS functionality, the Shanghai WOW! app gauges your positioning, and tells you how far you are from each attraction. This is great for people who don’t know the city, as it’s often hard to know what is in your vicinity if you’re not familiar with your surroundings – something that a regular Shanghai city guide wouldn’t be able to tell you! The app also links up to Google Maps so you’ll never get lost. In a Shanghai guide that’s aimed at visitors who don’t know the city, this is a great feature.The interface is super-simple to use. You can either do a straight search on a destination or attraction, scroll through a full list, or choose from the categories Art & Entertainment, Buildings & Monuments, Clubs & Bars, and Culture & History. This is great if you want to do a morning of cultural sightseeing, for example. All you would do is hit the ‘nearby’ button and select Culture & History. There’s also a “favourite” button for you to customise your Shanghai city guide. Whichever way you choose to search, when you get to the page for the destination you want, you’ll see a photo which leads to the gallery which you can scroll through, some info about the attraction, and a “view map” button. Another thing I really like about the ShanghaiWOW! app is that it’s more than just a regular Shanghai city guide. You get extras like photo galleries for each destination, so you can see what it looks like before you visit, and addresses in Chinese to show to taxi drivers. Best of all, the app doesn’t cost anything, so you get some amazing content plus a great interface for free – not bad.