Johannesburg-based mobility application development company PDA Solutions has introduced the Collins Bird eGuide, the UK`s first electronic birding field guide for handheld devices.
The launch of the electronic version of The Collins Bird Guide at the British Birdwatching Fair at the Rutland Water Nature Reserve last weekend follows the South African company producing the Sasol eBirds Pocket PC application in 2003 and more recently eWildlife and eSnakes guides for the southern African region.
"Our experience in producing electronic field guides for southern Africa made us the logical choice for this new guide," says Rob Hannaford, technical director of PDA Solutions.
"The Collins Bird eGuide was very well received at the event attended by around 30 000 people from around the world and we believe it has set expectations for future electronic field guides," says Hannaford.
While in the UK, Hannaford and business partner Otto Werdmuller Von Elgg met with Collins Publishers to discuss further electronic guides based on reference publications for UK and European trees, butterflies and other wildlife.
Hannaford and Von Elgg believe applications like the wildlife guides and global positioning system applications like the map navigation, tracking and data-collection they have developed will drive adoption of mobile devices.
Like its southern African counterpart, the electronic birding guide developed for the UK market features information text, photographs, birdcalls, distribution maps and search facility to help identify birds in the field.
"We have designed all our field guides to install automatically upon insertion of a secure digital memory card without the need for a PC and without using any of the mobile device`s internal memory for storage," explains Hannaford.
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