Lingopal iPhone Travel App Review
Posted on 22. Aug, 2009 by iPhone App Reviewer in $10, iPhone Reference App Reviews, iPhone Travel App Reviews, iPhone Utilities App Reviews
Lingopal: A greatly executed phrasebook but unfortunately limited.
| Our Rating: 4.8/10 |  |
[Screenshots] |
Version Reviewed: 1.0.2
Developer: Lingopal Holdings Pty Ltd
Price as of Review: $9.99
Current iTunes Rating: 4/5
Size: 192MB
Lingopal is a multilingual phrase book which allows you to translate around 300 phrases from one language to another. A wide variety of languages are available for you to choose from for translating to and from. Due to the small amount of actual phrases, Lingopal might not do so well as a real phrasebook app when you’re traveling in a foreign country.
Luckily the developer has done an excellent job on the interface, it’s darkly themed and very smooth. Browsing around all the phrases is a breeze with drop-down phrases, search, favourites and a categorized menu. The interface is controlled via touch, however there seems to be some lag and unresponsiveness in the interface. Each phrase can read and dictated to the user, a huge annoyance is the speed of the dictation and volume. At max volume you can hardly hear the phrases in a noisy environment (i.e. a travel environment), an no my ears aren’t getting old. Mix that with the speed of the dictation, it’s almost useless. Settings for this is definitely a need in the future. To make this truly useful, I think a pronunciation mode would be awesome – select a quip of the text and go through each syllable.
All in all, Lingopal is a great quick reference, with some of the categories such as Insults and Flirting it might even be entertaining for some (I mean who doesn’t want to ask “Are your parents cousins?” in over 30 languages?). Due to the limited nature and all the annoyances of the app, Lingopal fails to be a good reference. It’s got a great interface to kickstart future development, lets hope the developers continue working on this one.
Final Ratings:
Usefulness: 3.8/10 – Due to the small amount of phrases and the poor dictation mode it fails to be useful.
User Interface: 7/10 – Really slick but unfortunately unresponsive.
Price: 4/10 – Considering that Lingopal is more useful for entertaining, $9.99 is a poor set price.
Technology: 4/10 – Lacks settings and much needed abilities to customize. Poor touch responsiveness.
Execution of Concept: 5/10 – Quite disappointed.
Overall Rating: 4.8/10
Further Improvements:
- Theme settings – optimized readability in any environment (white on black isn’t always great)
- More advanced dictation mode
- Fix misc. glitches such as touch lag
- More phrases. Much more phrases
- Dynamic translator! Even if not for all languages…
- $9.99 isn’t worth it until we get some more features in there.
More screenshots on our Flickr Page.
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4 Responses to “Lingopal iPhone Travel App Review”
Leave a Reply
Richard from Lingopal
23. Aug, 2009
Hi,
I’m Richard, the guy behind Lingopal, and I thought I’d take this opportunity to write a reply to your review.
Firstly, thanks for doing the review. I know that with 65,000 apps all clamouring for attention, app reviewers come under a fair amount of pressure, and to even get a review is sometimes a small achievement in itself.
You raise some interesting points and fair criticism. The speed of dictation by some (not all) languages is too fast. We’re working on a couple of solutions to fix that. The touch lag is a new one to me, and I’ll have a word to our developers. The theme settings is an interesting one, and worth looking into – thanks for the tip
I’d also like to clarify some of your comments which I feel are not quite accurate. First, the number of phrases. You mention around 300 when there are several more hundred than that. Also, I don’t feel you gave enough attention to the actual number of languages we’ve covered. The app includes 42 languages, and it’s as useful for the English-speaking guy going to France as it is for the Russian going to Thailand (we’re also waiting on an update approval from Apple which includes Arabic & Hebrew).
If you consider that some of our competitors (for instance Lonely Planet) charge the same price for ONE language > ONE language (e.g English > French), then I would like to think that users were actually getting a really good deal. That’s 24 cents per language. I would also encourage you to do a phrase-count comparison with their offering.
Finally, I’d like to point out to readers that we’re mindful that a lot of people wouldn’t want all those languages, nor be bothered with downloading such a big app. So we’ve made the languages available individually, priced at $0.99 each. Italian and Swedish are free, so try them out as a first port of call.
Be warned – their extra content has them rated 17+!
Cheers,
Richard
iPhone App Reviewer
24. Aug, 2009
Thanks for your excellent commentary Richard! You’re right about the number of phrases – sorry about that. I wouldn’t give your competitors much of a higher rating even if I did; I just think that translators with only specific phrases aren’t flexible enough to be a truly useful app.
Folks if you’re reading the review, take word into Richard’s comments – Lingopal is a great start and still deserves your attention.
Have a great day everyone!
iPhone App Reviewer
24. Aug, 2009
Oh and as for the touch lag, I’m on an iPod Touch so the hardware is slightly different. I’ve restarted my iPod to refresh the RAM but still getting the same problem.
Joker
24. Aug, 2009
Hi,
http://www.iphoneappreviewer.com – da best. Keep it going!