<![CDATA[Gizmodo: tourist]]> http://tags.gizmodo.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gizmodo.com.png <![CDATA[Gizmodo: tourist]]> http://gizmodo.com/tag/tourist http://gizmodo.com/tag/tourist <![CDATA[Tourists Rescued from Swiss Mountains Thanks to Magic iPod]]> Two French tourists were rescued today in the Swiss mountains after getting lost on a ski trip. They managed to contact authorities, but their phone died shortly thereafter. Thank God somebody brought an iPod.

The tourists, a skier and snowboarder, were lost in the mountains of Southeast Switzerland, with temperatures reaching -15 degrees Celsius. They attempted to phone for help, but their mobile phone ran out of juice just after making the connection. Luckily, the faint light of an iPod screen was enough to catch the eye of a helicopter rescue team, who recovered the two sports enthusiasts quickly enough to avoid any more serious consequences than very mild hypothermia.

Reuters reported this story, but didn't go into the kind of detail that techies like you and I really need. What kind of iPod was it? What generation? What brightness setting was the backlight set to? Is there a difference in helicopter visibility between, say, LCD and OLED? Without that kind of information, I don't know that I can ever go skiing in remote Swiss mountains again. [Reuters]

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<![CDATA[NEC Phone Translates Spoken Voice Into Touristy Demands]]> A newly developed phone from NEC will take the spoken words of Japanese tourists and turn them into an English translation on the fly. The translator's 50,000 word vocab is geared towards the typical tourist pleas: "Can I have a subway route map?" "How far away is the hotel?" and "Where can I find decent Japanese food in this God-forsaken country?" The translation appears as text, rather than being played aloud as voice, because that takes more horsepower and the developers are afraid of a miscommunication. While we've seen dedicated translation devices from IBM and even NEC's own early prototype, this is the first time the entire system fits on a small chip mounted within a functioning cell phone. Too bad the technology wasn't around soon enough to help Chris Farley. [AFP]

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