SHOULD the guidebook industry be feeling anxious? The Sunday Times draws attention to an interesting new gadget, Wikitude, which could render some guides obsolete. Wikitude combines accessibility—it's a piece of software that can run on certain mobile phones—with the encyclopaedic breadth of the Wikipedia website to provide detailed information about what you see around you.

You point your phone at something, and as long as it's one of the 350,000 points of interest in the Wikitude database, the software will tell you what you’re looking at and then provide the relevant Wikipedia spiel.

Technically, it’s an impressive piece of kit:

It’s built to run on Google’s new Android operating system for mobiles - and the first phone to have that is the just-released T-Mobile G1, which uses GPS and triangulation to know exactly where it is and which way it’s facing.

It works pretty well, according to the Sunday Times' reviewer, whose only struggle in London was with the Tower of London. At the moment, indeed, the only real down side is the cost:

The system relies on internet downloads, which come free with your contract in the UK, but set you back upwards of £1.50 per megabyte overseas. Brussels is promising to force rates down for EU states. When it does, someone should warn the recycling plants - an awful lot of guidebooks are heading for the bin.

If internet fees in foreign countries are the only problem, then it seems to me that there's an obvious market here for hotels. They could rent out Wikitude-enabled phones to their guests, to allow them to take advantage of local tariffs. And everyone wins.