One of my favorites topics ;-) (from at least back to 2002
http://www.tokyopc.org/newsletter/2002/06/train_route_planners.html)
For starters, I'm a big fan of appli rather than web sites for train
route planners. You'll find it is a lot faster (and lot less clicks)
to get results. Very important when making a snap decision between
routes to shave an extra 2 minutes of your journey time. Supposedly
you also save packets - important if you are not on a flat rate plan
(although of course you have the cost of downloading the appli).
Finally, the features for saving favorite routes and stations are much
more accessible.
I reguarly (once every 3 months or so?) do a comparison of all the
official (and any unofficial if I find them) route finder sites to
check out the latest features. For quite a long time Ekitan has had by
far the best appli for DoCoMo. The FOMA version is supreme with the
train schedules, route planners, countdown alarm etc. extremely fast,
intuitive and usable.
I was very disappointed to find that I could only find one or two very
poorly designed appli for AU when I used a W21CA for about 8 months
last year BUT, of course, AU users don't really need to worry about
that because they have the ultimate route planner built-in in the form
of EZNaviWalk. Although the route planner and timetable functions
aren't quite as usable as the Ekitan appli, this appli would still win
in many situations and is likely more than satisfactory for every day
use. i-area just gives a list of stations in the area to choose from
which is not very useful. I have never used the Ekitan appli on a GPS
FOMA handset but I'm sure we'll see even more improvements when GPS
gets put into all DoCoMo handsets. EZNaviWalk often also tells you
which car of the train to get on for the most convenient exit which
the Ekitan appli does not. The EZNaviWalk appli also has a standalone
train route finder if for any reason you don't want to use the full
navi option.
Finally I wouldn't worry about the 200-300 yen a month for these
services. The time you save will pay back likely thousands of times
that.
In short, use EZNaviWalk.
Your resident keitai train route finder otaku.
Andrew
www.andrewshuttleworth.com
> On Mon, 9 Jan 2006, Peter Jacobs wrote:
>
> > I'm looking for some train schedule sites (Japanese or
> > English) to use on my KDDI AU keitai.
Received on Wed Jan 11 17:18:11 2006