Hi, I’m planing to be in Taiwan for about 6 month or so, to learn Chinese. I bought an itouch to use (I will be loan a regular cell phone but I was told use it sparing) as a PDA, Sykpe phone, blogging, etc. Do you guys have any suggestions on useful apps to download or tips on how I should use it in Taipei and Taiwan? Where is the best places to look for free Wifi? Thanks!
Which iPod Touch generation?
Free WiFi is few and far between. If you have a friend who can read Chinese, you may want to consider subscribing to WiFly, which is cheap and has coverage in most places where you might sit and use the device.
Turn on your PinYin keyboard.
A great app for learning is Pleco. The instant translate feature (point your camera at a word, it translates and shows the PinYin) has been a godsend for me.
Pleco’s great for Chinese. If I recall correctly, the app itself is free, but then there are add-ons (such as the camera character recognition) that you have to pay for.
TaiwanYo’s pretty good for finding nearby restaurants, although I’m not sure how well this works without GPS. The iTouch gives you a reasonable location lock with just the cell phone signal, doesn’t it?
There are a bunch of bus/ transit maps, none of which I’ve found particularly useful, but maybe you can figure them out better than I have: iBus Taipei (separate Chinese versions and English versions), i84, TaipeiBus. (Main issue I have: to plot a route, they need to know your current bus stop NAME, and the bus stop NAME of your destination. You can’t just drag from one point to another on a map.)
Isn’t 7-11 introducing Wifi? Or is that part of the citywide WiFly service? Anyway, free Wifi is now rather hard to find. If you’ll want to use it frequently you’ll have to sign up with, most likely, WiFly. I can’t remember their rates.
What I use the most of in Taipei is the Maps app, but that probably won’t help you much on an iPod Touch.
from memory, wifly for ipod touch is about $1200NT a year… pretty inexpensive and I think they have an english language sign up page… i think you just connect to wifly when you’re at the MRT and it’ll give you options to sign up. info at wifly.com.tw/Wifly7/en/
Thanks. I’ll def check out wifly and the bus apps.