Sunday, July 2, 2006; P02
An occasional look at new features on the Web.
Feel more comfortable scrolling through a screen than leafing through a book? Schmap, a new series of interactive travel guides, may be your keys to the city.
Think Google Earth meets Frommer's meets Mapquest. Log on to Schmap.com, and with just a few keystrokes, download the free Schmap player and any or all of 70 interactive guides to cities across the globe (for PCs only right now; a Mac version is scheduled for release in November). The writing is dry and the content is the standard hotels-tours-sights-restaurants, but the way the info is integrated is a marvel.
With a few clicks, you can call up the street map of a specific neighborhood. Place a check on any of 20 categories, from hotels to antiques to museums, and icons marking their locations pop up on the map. Move your cursor over any of the icons and a picture, review and link to its Web site are displayed.
The site comes with some fun extras. Want to find out whether you can walk from your hotel to a favorite restaurant? Draw a line between the two with the distance measure tool (it'd be nice if the site used miles instead of meters, but let's not quibble). Or click on the tour function and the program roams from place to place, showing reviews and other info as you fly over the city.
The privately owned company, which uses content from Wcities and maps from Tele Atlas, plans to cover 189 North American and European destinations by November. It doesn't charge fees for inclusion or take paid advertising, but it will soon open a travel store and will link to hotel booking sites and Amazon.com.
For now, Schmap remains in the beta testing phases, and it's not without bugs. Icons sometimes run amok (the Zodiac bar in Oxford, England, pops up on the map in three different places), and content is sometimes outdated (the San Diego guide states that plans are underway for a new ballpark to be completed in 2002). But considering the breadth and depth of the information, the occasional error can be forgiven.
-- Carol Sottili
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