Over-packed travellers will soon be able to leave one thing out of their backpack, as travel guide specialists Lonely Planet moves to make their store of information available on mobile phones.

According to a developer for the Australian-headquartered company, Vance Heredia, the project will allow a traveller to dial into a Lonely Planet server via their mobile to access information about places to stay, eat and visit rather than pull out and leaf through a guidebook.

"The application gives a real time list of cities on the server," Heredia told ZDNet Australia . "They can choose which city they want to go to, then choose cuisine, restaurants, and so on."

The team was inspired to create the mobile application when they heard about the Asia Java Mobile Challenge, which is run by a number of telecommunications players, including Optus, as well as tech company Sun Microsystems. Lonely Planet was selected as one of twenty finalists from over 1,000 entries from 23 countries. The only other Australian finalist was Hashbang, which created an application providing time zone information.

"The program was initially designed for Palm and then a couple of months before the Java challenge we heard about [the challenge], and reworked it for that," said Heredia. "We said, 'Let's get this to mobile'."

"So we moved all the GUI (graphical user interface) apps, redesigned and reimplemented right from scratch, it took about a month," said Herevia.

The program currently works on the Nokia 7650, and the team are busy porting it to other phones with different screen and memory sizes. Also, different phones have different features, according to Heredia, so Siemens users will be able to click on the organisation they've found on the database and dial them automatically.

Chandi Perera, Lonely Planet's general manager for information technology, told ZDNet Australia   the current application is a prototype to see what the technology looks like, and there is no firm launch date. However, they are talking to telcos around the world about bringing the technology to market.

"We need to be sure of maturity of market," said Perera. "It would really depend on the charging model we come up with on a per contract basis. We're open to charging ideas."

"We're very interested in this type of technology and providing digital information on the run," he added. "Our digital content strategy is an integral part of our content strategy."

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