Fjell

Fjell answers one question: how long would it take to walk there?

Point your phone at a ridge on the horizon and Fjell names what you are looking at and tells you how far it is. Press and hold anywhere on the map and it works out the walk, across real terrain, on real paths.

HOW THE TIME IS WORKED OUT

Not straight-line distance. Fjell builds a grid of the ground between you and the place you picked, weighing slope, woods, water, trails and roads, then times the route with Tobler's hiking function, the published model of how walking speed falls away with steepness. Your pace, your pack and whether you stop to sleep all change the answer.

Long walks get days, nights and sunrises. Short ones get an arrival time.

LOOK

Hold up the camera and the landscape gets labelled. Peaks, towns, lakes, with distance and height. Tap any hillside, named or not, and Fjell works out exactly which patch of ground you pointed at and how long it would take to reach it.

WITH NO SIGNAL

Save an area before you go and everything keeps working with the phone in airplane mode. Maps draw, places search, routes compute, Look reads the terrain. The bigger the area, the coarser the detail it saves, so a whole region still fits on your phone.

WATER

Rivers and lakes stop most routing apps dead. Fjell lets you decide: stay dry and go around, or swim it. Swimming is modelled at honest open-water speeds, which are far slower than walking, and the crossing is drawn and reported separately.

ALSO

Discovery signals