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Very interesting... I am planning on getting an iPhone before my trip to San Francisco next month. I'll be sure to pick up a guide and talk to the locals as well.

DK Travel Guide FTW!

DK Travel guide's are the best, big bold graphics, lots of colour, district by district information.

They are NOT for off-the-beaten-path tourist destinations. They are for people who want to see traditionally famous landmarks. For that there is no better substitute.

Using your phone as a travel guide won't get any better until the monopoly on global mapping is broken. Yelp! and others just can't do very much in comparison to print
media.

That said, for non-traditional tourism and off-the-path destination and night-life hopping, it's hard to beat a mobile phone and social network solution like Yelp! They have immediacy and intimacy print publications can't ever match.

I've never traveled with a smartphone and I've never traveled overseas with a cell phone at all. In fact, I rarely have taken a guidebook, preferring to wing it with recommendations and the occasional look at someone else's book on a bus or at a hostel.

That said, books have the advantage hands down: use them anywhere in the world, any time of day or night, for any amount of time. They can be read in bright daylight, passed around on a bus, handed over for someone to find you on a map, dropped (even in water if you let them dry out), notes scribbled in the margin and ticket stubs and souvenir cards tucked in between the pages.

So what if you can't see the most up-to-date yelp review (no matter how much I use yelp to find a new lunch spot etc) but part of travelling is exploring, finding new spots and talking to locals to find them.

And reading a book on a bus rarely makes you a robbery target, flashing an iphone in a large portion of the world will.