At one point, as tensions were rising between Google and Apple, it seemed as if the search giant would forgo native app development on the iOS platform and instead only offer service those users through HTML5-based web apps. But lately, that approach has been changing, quickly. In just the past few months, we’ve seen apps like Google Voice, Latitude, and Places all launch natively. And today brings another: Google Translate.
Google Translate has previously been available on the iPhone via an HTML5 experience since mid 2008. But again, now iPhone users are getting a native experience with some significant new additions. Those include the awesome “speak-to-translate” and “listen to your translations”. Another new feature allows you to enlarge translated text to full-screen mode so you can more easily show it to someone you’re trying to communicate with.
Here’s Google’s overview of the main features:
Speak to translate
The new app accepts voice input for 15 languages, and—just like the web app—you can translate a word or phrase into one of more than 50 languages. For voice input, just press the microphone icon next to the text box and say what you want to translate.
Listen to your translations
You can also listen to your translations spoken out loud in one of 23 different languages. This feature uses the same new speech synthesizer voices as the desktop version of Google Translate we introduced last month.
Full-screen mode
Another feature that might come in handy is the ability to easily enlarge the translated text to full-screen size. This way, it’s much easier to read the text on the screen, or show the translation to the person you are communicating with. Just tap on the zoom icon to quickly zoom in.
It would seem that Google is still definitely favoring the Android version of their apps, as the Translate one on that platform has the awesome interpreter feature which isn’t found here (yet). But clearly, Google is starting to bet on native apps more heavily for the time-being rather than just the HTML5 variety.
You can now find the app in the App Store here globally.
Google Translate is a beta service provided by Google Inc. to translate a section of text, or a webpage, into another language. The service limits the number of paragraphs, or range of technical terms, that will be translated. It is also possible to enter searches in a source language that are first translated to a destination language allowing you to browse and interpret results from the selected destination language in the source language. For some languages, users are asked...
Apple’s iPhone was introduced at MacWorld in January 2007 and officially went on sale June 29, 2007, selling 146,000 units within the first weekend of launch. The phone has been hailed as revolutionary with its bundle of advanced mobile web browsing, music and video playback, and touch screen controls. The iPhone is exclusively carried on the networks of both AT&T and Verizon in the U.S. An iPhone can function as a video camera (video recording was not a standard feature...
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