Europe Travel Guides for Nokia, Sony/Ericson and various other brands Smartphones running the Symbian S60 3rd edition operating system.

Also consult http://www.nokia.com for a survey of all models and detailed specifications or go to http://www.softwaremarket.nokia.com for online shopping.

How does it work?

There are several ways how you can download the Europe Travel Guides (ETG's) in your mobile phone. (it is recommended to store the ETG's on the MiniSD card from your mobile phone)

By far the cheapest method is to download the ETG's first to a PC which is connected to the Internet. Then you connect your mobile phone e.g. via USB to that PC and transfer the ETG's to your smartphone with software that comes with each smartphone. You only need to do this once (except for updates). Consulting the travel information does NOT require to make a dataconnection with a server which would cost you a fortune, even when consulting e.g. only a few hotels. So once downloaded you don't need the communication possibility!

Another method is to connect to a website directly with the mobile phone and download - via a UMTS connection - the ETG's to your mobile phone's MiniSD card. That's the expensive method, although you only need to do this once.

In both cases you have all the data from 1 or more cities stored in your mobile phone. This in contrast with a client/server solution where no data is stored in your mobile phone and every time you access a hotel or restaurant you generate data xfer costs.

How to use the Europe Travel Guides?

You can browse the ETG completely offline and compare hotels or restaurants, until you find one that suits your needs. (No datacomm costs) Then you want to make a reservation or ask if they have rooms or a table. You can do that in 3 ways:

  • Calling the hotel directly with the given telephone number from within the guide (normal mobile phone costs) by selecting the telephone number
  • Sending the hotel an e-mail from within the guide (e-mail costs) by selecting the e-mail address
  • Surf to the website of the hotel from within the guide and fill out a reservation form if available (datacomm costs) by selecting the URL from the hotel website

This is much, much cheaper then working in a client/server envirenment, where datacomm costs are huge.

PDF Reader :

For reading the pdf travel guides on a smartphone, you need a pdf reader. At this moment there are 2 readers available for the E61, E62 smartphone:

  • The pdf reader from Adobe for the E61, E62 smartphone
  • The pdf reader from mBrainsoft for the S60 3rd generation smartphones

The Adobe reader is still in beta test and lacks a lot of functions. It also cannot open large pdf files. The mBrainsoft reader is much richer in functionality and processes pdf files from up to 10 MByte and more.

NB It is not possible to read pdf files with the Via Michelin application for the Smartphones. This is a communication client for a server where the data is stored. For every hotel or restaurant all the data is every time sent to your smartphone. Using this device will significantly increase your telephone bill.