In a nutshell…

A tour guide in your pocket that’ll help you find your way between attractions with maximum efficiency. After all, nobody wants to look lost when you’re actually trying to guide your missus round the best bits of gay Paris…

Judgement time…

Tourism’s a trepidatious pastime. One wrong turn can ruin a day of sightseeing, or at least make you lose valuable gawping time. MetrO’s sole purpose is to avoid that.

Tell it which city you’re visiting, tap in a start point and end point and it’ll give you detailed directions between the two. Its location selection is limited to tourist attractions, so it’s no good for finding a specific address, but then that’s not what it’s designed for.

As well as plotting a course between attractions, MetrO can spit out information on any point in between. It’ll tell you which lines run through train stations, which busses run to attractions and what else there is to see at stations you might need to pass en route.

There’s the option to share routes with friends using MMS or Bluetooth, but sadly there’s no option to e-mail an itinerary.

The control system is also slightly clunky. We tested MetrO on an N95, and the app occasionally failed to register the centre button as ‘select’, forcing us to choose ‘options’ and ‘select’. It’s a minor niggle, but one that cropped up too often to let slide.

The app also crashed when bombarded with requests for directions, behaving much better when given time to think about our routes.

Overall though, MetrO’s a wonderful app for travellers. It’s free, there’s a decent set of cities to choose from and the information it provides is accurate, fast and detailed. Slip it in your case the next time you jet off for the weekend.