London2Go review

Andrew Williams

We review London2Go, an app that lets you plan London sightseeing trips even if you're on the tube

Rating:

Verdict: London2Go is in need of a few tweaks, but having quick offline access to bags of well-ordered info about and maps of London is a minor godsend

Pros: All content available offline, locates your position, features loads of places of interest

Cons: No journey planner feature, information taken directly from Wikipedia

Version reviewed: 1.01

Publisher: Tymon Wiedemair

Price: Free

More Info: London2Go on the App Store

If you're out and about in London and want to avoid looking like a tourist, you need to stop taking that huge, fold-out map around with you. Not only will it make you look less out of place, it'll stop you from annoying everyone else as you block off a whole street by un-folding the thing in the middle of Oxford Street.

London2Go is designed to stop these awkward moments by helping you find all the best places to go in London, and exactly where you need to go to get them. If you don't already know where you want to end up, you can use the app's simple home screen menu to find attractions.

It splits them up into various categories, from Entertainment to Transport and historical points of interest. As long as your iPhone can get a GPS or net connection, London2Go will find out exactly where you are, so that it can tell you how far away you are from each of London's must-visit locales.

After having a look through the categories, you'll find your way to an actual list of attractions. Rather than just telling you their names, London2Go gives you a short blurb on each place of interest. Clicking a list item will take you to an information page on the place, which has shamelessly been lifted wholesale from Wikipedia.

More useful is the ability to see where each place in the list sits on the map. It's especially useful if London2Go's locked into your location to, making it easy to find out how to get there. The app's less than perfect on this front though. There's no journey planner to tell you which route to take to get there, and you can't bring up tube stations on the map either.

However, London2Go makes up for this on one important front- none if its information is streamed from the internet, it's all included in the initial download, from the detailed map to the Wikipedia entries. This makes navigating around the map ultra-quick since it's only the iPhone's CPU that has to do the work, not your Internet connection.

This means that you can use all of London2Go's functionality, apart from the ‘find your location' feature, even if you're on the tube. So, while this app has a way to go before we'll label it truly indispensable, it has a couple of killer positives that make up fairly well for its shortcomings- an excellent list of tourist attractions and the ability to find out about them wherever you are in London.