Mobile travel application developer Steape has partnered with travel publisher Lonely Planet to develop audio phrasebooks for Java-enabled mobile phones. Steape has worked with Lonely Planet to develop mobile phrasebooks in 10 languages, with translations from English into Mandarin, Vietnamese, Cantonese, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Thai, Czech and Spanish. Each contains around 200 phrases with both text and audio translations, recorded by native speakers. Other languages are in development.
The phrasebooks, which play audio through the phones loudspeaker, are available for hundreds of mobile phones running the Java MIDP 2.0 platform, with versions also available for Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices.
Our phrasebooks are extremely popular and an essential travel tool, says Lonely Planet Director of Global Business Development, Chris Boden. It is a natural progression for us to make this content available on mobile phones. The applications will be made available through handset manufacturers and mobile network operators worldwide.