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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