• October 16, 2008

Mobile travel application developer Steape has partnered with travel publisher Lonely Planet to offer audio phrasebooks for java-enabled mobile phones.

Amsterdam-based 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 phone's 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.--Tanya Irwin