Do you find yourself often wondering where a good place to dine or maybe where to get some great souvenirs in a city you may be visiting for work or leisure would be? Is your GPS just not cutting it for you? Too timid to ask a local for suggestions? But wait! You have an iPhone and Google Maps seems to be working for you. Well, kind of. No worries, mate, SvenOnTech just discovered Schmap! While the name makes me think of having a shot of peppermint schnapps, the new city guide made just for the iPhone goes live with its public beta Monday that’ll help you with all your city guide needs.

With Schmap, you’ll be able to find a nice place to dine, attractions, stores, and many other easy to find items from the simple laid out iPhone-like interface. Drilling down to a place that fits your desires, you’ll be able to find the address, phone number, email address, and web site of the place all with a tap of your finger. Tap on one of the items and the corresponding iPhone application opens it. From dialing the number to showing you where the place is on Google Maps, you’ll be quickly on your way to your new found Point of Interest, or POI as us geeks call it. If you’d rather stay in Safari, just turn the iPhone onto its side and Schmap presents a map of the POI right there befor you! It looks just like Google Maps on your desktop computer. Reason being is, well, it’s powered by Google Maps. Nice! You will also be able to do local city searches once the service is fully initialized.

What I really liked about Shmap is how light-weight it is. EDGE connections are not spiffy by any shot and thankfully the folks at Schmap not only gave us a familiar interface but one that loads quickly, too. Anytime you tap on a form element that needs a number only, a keypad comes up, not the regular keyboard. Yes, a basic thing for any iPhone developer, but man, I can’t even begin to tell you how many iPhone “ready” sites are missing this little thing. Schmap didn’t forget us keypad tapping folks.

Overall, the site offers some useful information for the average tourist but I did find some more mainstream names missing such as Starbucks and Peet’s from the Coffee/Tea category. Donald McMillan of Schmap explained this is because, “The current content does tend to focus on more unique/independent locations”. Don’t worry though, you coffee snobs, McMillan said the local search will kick back your well branded caffeine hits once it is up and running. I noted that also omitted from the Shopping category is malls. I was told by McMillan that malls can be found in “Stores & Arcades”. Both Sacramento and San Jose did return a good sized list for the “arcades”.

Schmap is in beta, so this means things can change, be added, removed, or just plain fixed if there are bugs found. Give it a spin on Monday (www.schmap.com) and be sure to let the Schmap team know what it can do to improve the city guide experience. Until then, take a look at the preview page on your big boy Safari (or other browser.)

Now I need to satisfy this peppermint craving….

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