Launched for 32 Chinese cities, the Taxi-Book iPhone/ iPad/ iPod Touch applications are your handy guides to key locations and a way to communicate with locals.
The apps integrate city guides, maps, translation & Chinese speech function to overcome communication issues.
Taxi-Book – Handy city guides for all key Chinese cities:
• know your position + help you find your destination
• know thousands of key locations
• different search functions
• speak Chinese for you!
• 10 handy categories
• frequently updated
• GPS
Kindly find more info down below & free Lite version on: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/china-taxi-book/id445493942?mt=8#
Android version & worldwide development are next..
Your destination, our drive!
The Apps are made to help you navigate through a city by listing its key locations and allowing you to get there comfortably. Taxi-Book talks to Chinese taxi-drivers who can bring you to your destinations. Just choose a location and show its name and address, along with an instructional phrase in Chinese (“Take me to …, please.”) to a local taxi driver.
The available cities are:
Beijing 北京 (free Lite version)
Beijing 北京 (full)
Changsha 长沙
Chengdu 成都
Chongqing 重庆
Dalian 大连
Dongguan
Foshan
Fuzhou 福州
Hangzhou 杭州
Harbin 哈尔滨
Hongkong 香港
Guangzhou 广州
Guilin 桂林
Kunming 昆明
Lijiang
Nanjing 南京
Ningbo
Qingdao 青岛
Sanya 三亚
Shanghai 上海
Shenyang 沈阳
Shenzhen 深圳
Suzhou 苏州
Tianjin 天津
Wenzhou 温州
Wuhan 武汉
Wuxi
Xi`an 西安
Xiamen 厦门
Yantai
(More cities are coming soon!)
The app also features dialogue options for communicating with locals in their language: more than 70 phrases are written in Chinese and can be pronounced via Text-To-Speech Synthesis. Note that you may fill gaps in the phrases using our English-Chinese dictionary containing more than 12,000 words. For example, in a restaurant you may say “I’m allergic to … (select/dictionary). Could you make this dish without it?” in perfect Chinese. Some phrases also feature likely answer options that the dialogue partners may choose as a reply.
This free app comes with a Beijing city guide which contains more than 500 locations in China’s capital. And if that’s not enough for you, just upgrade through buying the full content of Beijing to unlock more than 1,500 locations and speech output for all dialogues.
Taxi-Book also offers more city guides for all key Chinese cities. Each city contains hundreds of locations divided into ten useful categories for easy browsing. Some categories are further divided into useful sub-categories like French or Italian Restaurants. And if you don’t feel like browsing through the lists, just use the fast search option on each city’s home page to find the locations you are looking for.
Note: Buying another city means you pay just one time and can use it forever. There are NO HIDDEN COSTS.
Features:
- Locations: Hundreds of locations divided into 10 categories are featured.
- Locations come with detailed information like English and Chinese name, address, phone number, and GPS coordinates.
- View locations on Maps and find nearby places easily (requires online connectivity). You can also add your own locations, enter and save their data if you have discovered a new place that is not covered in the app.
- Once you’ve chosen a location, press the Taxi-Card button to bring up a simple yet effective page that allows you to tell a taxi driver clearly where you want to go. Show the page to the driver and shake the phone to make it pronounce the phrase with your desired destination.
- Taxi-Card: Choose between different color styles to customize the page to your liking.
- Dialogues: Special dialogues for use in a taxi situation like “Turn on the meter, please” or “How long will the ride take approximately?”
- Basic Phrases: For everyday situations to say things like “Hello”, “Thank you”, tell others your name or ask where the restrooms are.
- Favourites: Pick your favourite locations out of all the locations and add them to your favourites list for quick and easy access.
*Please note that while the app is designed to work in offline mode, using Map view and buying in-app purchasable content require internet access.
This is a very nice product to get around in China, made my life much more comfortable
I like it, but the Chongqing App has lots of bugs, crashes quite often when attempting to click on an individual listing for more detail. How often is this updated? Many of the postings are old, new locations are missing, etc.
Dear Jason,
Thank you for your comment, much appreciated!
Question: are you using the separate “classic” Chongqing App or the one in the lite in-App purchasement system? A couple of months ago, Apple launched new regulations (informing us that that we were launching too much Apps & had to stop this). So we had to rethink our strategy and came up with the in-App purchasement system (currently 32 cities launched) in the free lite App.
In the last months, 3 Chongqing updates were launched, with the next changes in Version 1.4 (available 18/1/2012):
- added new locations to city database
- improved and/or corrected existing locations, deleted obsolete entries
- fixed minor bugs in dialogue handling
One of my team members was in Chonqing last week to do in-depth investigation. In the next update places like Sam’s Pizza, Muse and the 2nd Lotus Supermarket will be included.
Local feedback is the best source to make the App user-friendly. Please do send us error reports: if you can’t find a venue through the search function, we have a “Suggest venue button”. Mistakes can be told to us by the “Error report” button down every venue information. Feel also free to send updates to info@taxi-book.com
Find us on Facebook & Twitter for Taxi-Book news updates.
Thanks again & have a great year of the Dragon!
Your Destination, our Drive.
Dieter Vanonckelen
GM Taxi-Book