TripAdvisor mobile guides smartly steer tourists

— -- If you want to tour some of the world's big cities without hiring a guide or lugging a fat guidebook, TripAdvisor's new Mobile City Guides for Android smartphones and tablets now provide a sleek alternative.

You can download the free city guides one at a time from the Android Market and discover Self-Guided Free Tours of Beijing, the best restaurants in Chicago, an interactive map depicting the most noteworthy attractions in Boston, and an overview of culture and architecture in San Francisco.

TripAdvisor made its bones on traveler-penned hotel reviews. So each guide combines advice from TripAdvisor with plenty of travelers' hotel and restaurant reviews and ratings collected from TripAdvisor's global websites.

There are apps for 20 cities. Each guide uses your mobile device's GPS and compass features to detect your location and point you toward your sought-after attraction.

All the guides work offline, too, without Wi-Fi, so you can avoid wireless roaming charges as you travel .

But to download the guides, access app updates or get the most recent consumer-written hotel and restaurant reviews from TripAdvisor, you'll have to tap some wireless connection.

These TripAdvisor Mobile City Guides are fast, comprehensive and very tourist-friendly.

The New York City Guide, for example, offers 14 self-guided tours. The range from a one- to three-hour Brooklyn Bridge Walk to a half-day Cupcake Crawl bakery tour and a 10-stop Wall Street and Financial District amble.

A main gripe with the TripAdvisor Mobile City Guides is they are somewhat predictable and light on risk-taking.

Some of the New York City self-guided tours, for instance, advise bringing collapsible strollers to transport young kids or tote sanitizer or moist wipes on the Cupcake Crawl.

The Wall Street and Financial District Tour takes in the World Trade Center site and Trinity Church. It doesn't mention the nearby Occupy Wall Street protests, which have become a quirky tourist attraction.

And when the New York guide cites Macy's as one of its 100 best attractions, it doesn't detail why or provide any anecdotal information — other than what TripAdvisor's travelers' reviews say — about the landmark Herald Square store.

You'd have to consume some city guide information from Lonely Planet, which offers a competing New York City guide app for 99 cents to learn that Macy's "creaky old wooden elevators on the Broadway side are a must-do NYC experience."

The Point Me There feature of the TripAdvisor Mobile City Guide apps is cool. If your French is rusty and you don't want to ask for directions in Paris, tap the Point Me There arrow to learn the distance to your destination. The smartphone's compass will guide you there.

On the down side, there have been complaints online from users that TripAdvisor's city guide apps are memory hogs that sap a smartphone's memory. But the 14.88 MB New York City guide didn't have that problem.

A closer look at the TripAdvisor Mobile City Guides:

•Overview. Free mobile apps on Android devices for 20 global cities combine tips and information from TripAdvisor with traveler ratings and reviews. Includes restaurants, walking tours, attractions, hotels, neighborhoods, history, culture, architecture, weather and transportation information.