Imagine arriving in a city for the first time and consulting your wireless device to discover the most practical route into town from the airport, find current exhibits at museums, and determine how long you'll wait for a table at a hot restaurant.
Standard guidebooks get stale quickly as restaurants close and phone numbers change.
By contrast, several electronic guides on the market regularly update information on events or establishments. Electronic guides are also simplifying how travelers find their way around unfamiliar places. The arena's appeal has so far tempted several companies. Veteran travel publisher Lonely Planet offers CitySync, which features rich, detailed content from city guidebooks repackaged for hand-held devices. Its maps are somewhat clunky renderings of print counterparts, displaying only small squares of a city at a time, but a scrolling feature helps overcome this limitation.