Poison Maps is an amazing new type of map app with many unique and patent-pending features that make it the ultimate app for finding Points of Interest (hence “POIs on Maps”). This version covers the Far East, including China, Japan and the countries of continental South East Asia.

One particularly great and original feature is the use of signs that point to POIs that are off the map. This means that you can always see where the nearest points are, even if they are not currently visible.

The POIs are stored on your device, so that you can find them even when you are offline, for example when out in the countryside, or in a foreign city with expensive data charges.

Here are some of the many things that you can do with Poison Maps:

• Find travel POIs such as airports, railways stations, bus stations and stops, taxi ranks, ferries, hotels etc.

• Find help in case of emergency, such as the nearest hospitals, pharmacies, toilets, embassies, banks, mountain / sea rescue etc.

• Find things to do by checking out nearby tourist attractions.

• Navigate swiftly and with ease by using signs. This can be especially useful when hiking or mountain biking, when you don’t want to waste time studying a full map (which may not have much detail anyway).

• Use compass mode to easily identify what hills or towns you can see at a viewpoint.

• The app also has other uses such as easily seeing the distribution of brands across the region.

To help you do all this, Poison Maps includes all the standard functions that you would expect, plus many unique features:

• POIs are displayed using thousands of icons, including hundreds of brand logos. The name of each POI is shown alongside, if there is space.

• You can change the size, transparency and number of signs. You can even enlarge signs to closer POIs and fade signs to further POIs.

• Double-tapping a sign pans the map to the POI that the sign points to.

• Tap and hold the map and it will zoom out so that you can see what is around you. Then simply let go and it will zoom back in again.

• If you do not let go and instead move your finger whilst zoomed out, then you can rapidly pan across the map. This unique gesture allows you to navigate by using just one finger and one touch instead of performing multi-finger pinch and zoom gymnastics (although those are still available).

• Back & Forward buttons (like on a browser) allow you to retrace what you have viewed.

• Shake the device to see a different set of POIs.

• Search the web within the app for more details on any selected POI.

• POIs can be ‘pinned’ so that they are always visible.

The POIs come from OpenStreetMap which, like Wikipedia, is maintained by volunteers. If you see any errors or omissions then please consider amending the data yourself at www.openstreetmap.org.

This free version of Poison Maps includes three quarters of a million POIs in the travel and service categories. If you like the app, then you can upgrade to get the rest of the categories, plus the following extra features:

• Create your own POIs so that, for example, you can follow a sign back to where you parked your car.

• Prioritize POI types according to your preferences, such as your favourite food, your religion, make of car, bank, etc.

• Include online POIs from Apple in your search results.

• Customize the look of the map by showing selected POIs in the background.

• The full set of categories adds over half a million extra POIs, including restaurants, bars, shops, cinemas, theatres, fuel stations, car parks, car repair, hiking, cycling, sports, leisure, schools, churches, civic buildings, public buildings and much more.

If you travel a lot, then please consider the other regional versions of the app, as well as the global version, which contains all the POI types for the whole world (over 15 million POIs!).

There isn’t enough space here to describe everything the app does, so please install it and discover Poison Maps for yourself!