nanoomi

The latest object of my affection is my new Asus Transformer.

No it’s not a robot in disguise – rather it’s a new netbook. Or it’s a new Android Tablet.

Actually its both. On top we have a 10.1 inch resistive touch screen tablet with 1280×800 LCD display. It packs 1GB of RAM and 16GB of memory. You’ll purchase it in Korea running Android Honeycomb, but will be prompted to upgrade to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) as soon as you are connected via wifi and have enough juice in the battery.

Down below is the thing that separates the Transformer from other Tablets – the Keyboard. Yes you can get Keyboard docks for the Galaxy Tab, or Bluetooth it with the iPad but the integration of keyboard and tablet is where there is more than meets the eye. (There’s your gratuitous Transformers toy reference). The keyboard includes a multi-touch track pad, dedicated function keys including a system settings, camera, wifi, back and home buttons.

Excuse my horrendously messy desk!

But it is the USB ports that are amongst the greatest draws here.

Plug in a normal USB stick and browse files at will. SD card reader? No problem. USB charging? No worries – the only thing I haven’t done is plug my camera into it yet. Great for playing video (especially on the NVIDA powered 16:1 screen).

And has Android come of age or what? Ice Cream Sandwich is amazing (compared to The Galaxy Tab’s Gingerbread), and being able to use Chrome (in beta) from Google is bliss! Full web browsing on a tablet, Its been close in the past with The Dolphin Browser, but even in Beta, Chrome for Android is just like the Desktop experience. Finally Asus bundles in a slew of useful apps – including Polaris Office – the best Android Office Suite I have seen! (My horrid work documents that always get screwy format wise in anything but Word appear perfectly on screen and export nicely).

Other software includes An ebook thing, a UPnP thing you can stream media to on your home network app backup utilities and Asus offers a year of free cloud storage when you sign up.

Possible things I am going to have to watch out for: Lack of a protective case (bought one on eBay – it’s a’comin’) means the Transformer hasn’t left my desk (except to go on the radio this morning) so it has remained plugged in to the wall. Purported battery life is 5 and a half hours. We’ll see. Notably the keyboard also has a battery and charges the tablet when the two are attached.

The biggest issue I’m having at the moment is opening the damn thing!when attached to the keyboard and folded closed the tablet and keyboard lay flush. Most laptops have a little groove to give your fingers some purchase when opening. The Asus lacks one. The hinge on the keyboard side is new so quite stiff. Hopefully it’ll loosen up over time – not too loose though of course!

If you have a spare W499,000 and in the market for a netbook give the Transformer a look. (Technically an Asus EEE Tablet Transformer T101) Its ability to handle documents alone might be enough to persuade some people.

Score★★★★ 4/5

With Instagram still not available on Android, the market is open to competitors to stake their photo-sharing claims. Pudding.to is the latest, promising to be “The most innovative photo sharing app ever”. That means filters, yes, but also the ability to upload multiple photos, and richer tags including music and location.

So says the review I found somewhere. (Honestly I took an iPhone shot of it on a computer screen)

I have talked about Pudding before, specifically Pudding Camera – published by successful Korean App developers KT Hitel (part of the KT conglomerate of companies) who have brought you Pudding Camera (2011 iTunes App Store Best Seller, 20 odd thousand downloads on Android), Korean Celeb Face Match (Don’t ask!) and the original Korean Foursquare clone “I’m In” amongst others

KTH love their Phone cameras – as evidenced by the original Pudding Camera, which was translated to English and found great success outside of Korea. with their new App “Pudding.to” they’re taking on instagram with the ability to share those photos you’ve taken and add all the prerequisite filters it seems people are so craving to turn their “crap-snaps” and “sel-cas” into introspective lomo-ised works of art. (Not that I necessarily dislike that….)

KTH took the proactive step of launching pudding.to in both Korean and English simultaneously and have associated Blogs for Pudding Camera, pudding.to and Korean Celeb Face Match at – you guessed it – www.pudding.to (.to being the TLD for The Kingdom of Tonga and “to” being 2, as in their second camera app! Smart aye!)

Below is something of a walk-through of the app and some screenshots for Y’all:

Welcome to Pudding.to!

Like InstaGram, You can see popular photos

Recommendations on Pudding photographers to follow

User Profile

Take a picture

Add a filter, frame and add in a tilt-shift effect

Add a mood Tag

Or choose up to four photos for a collage effect

Be careful not to cut off any heads

Add a comment, Tag with hashtags, what you’re listening to or your current location

et voila!

These were taken on the iOS version of the app. I have had some trouble running Pudding.to on Android, specifically on Gingerbread 3.21 and Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0. I have been in touch with the developers at KTH and they note that the issue (not being able to login) is known and has to do with authentication on non-network devices, i.e. you can only use pudding.to on phones and tablets with 3G and LTE connectivity, my original Wifi Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 and Asus EEE Tablet Transformer (neither of which connects to a cell network) are sh*t out of luck – for now. I have been assured that the issue will be fixed in the next update – 1.0.3. I am not sure if this affects non-connected iPad 2s and iPod Touches with Cameras – Kudos to anyone who can test out the app and let me know.

Overall Pudding.to is a pretty good follow up to the original pudding camera. The addition of extra tagging options and ability to view users in your area add to the functionality and beat Instagram. In future updates I would like to see a couple of more filters and of course a fix for non-networked devices. Best of all – It’s free!

Score: ★★★★ 4/5

My favorite food in Korea is the kimbap (김밥), although with the new romanization rules, it’s now written gimbap! It’s a snack and a meal that isn’t native to Korea. It was introduced by the Japanese during the occupation period as the futomaki. Gimbap is made from rice (bap/밥). The gim (seaweed/김) is used to roll the rice and other ingredients into a tight package and then is sliced into bite-sized pieces for consumption. The rice is typically lightly seasoned with a little salt and oil, giving it a slightly different flavor than if ordering rice with a meal. Typical ingredients also include fish cakes, imitation crab meat, egg, radish, ham, carrots, spinach, and cucumbers.

-= WEB SITES =-
The Travel Channel: http://youtube.com/qiranger
The Vlog Channel: http://youtube.com/theqirangervlog
Podcast: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-qiranger-adventures/id451881376

Chris Backe of Chris in South Korea fame, has been working on an iPhone app called Seoul Taxi. designed to make life easier for visitors and residents alike, the app concentrates on making your communications with Seoul’s many and varied taxi drivers something of a more pleasant experience. Chris was  gracious enough to give me a free copy to review.

Designed for iOS 4 , the app is specifically for iPhone and iPad Touch and gets scaled if you use it on iPad. I can understand the choice here, if you are going to a destination I guess you are more likely to take your phone with you. On the other hand the iPhone’s display is a little small for your average middle aged taxi driver. Having to hand one’s phone over to a taxi driver is always a dodgy proposition while in contrast holding up the iPad’s 10 inch display is fine for even the most far sighted of Seoul’s taxi drivers!

The app lists over 2000 destinations in Seoul including over 800 restaurants and close to 100 hotels as well as other destinations ranging from art galleries (who knew there were so many galleries in Seoul) to over 150 bars.

Now if you know where you are going and are strictly using the app to assist you in your taxi dealings, simply enter the name of your  destination and hit search, odds are you’ll get the info you need.

Once you have found your destination you are presented with a couple of options. Selecting “Taxi Card”will display the address information in big , bold, white-on-black Korean which you then show your driver. Being an iOS app, hitting the phone number will place a call to the destination – particularly good if your driver still hasn’t figured out where to go from the address and hitting the location address option will bring up Google Maps just in case the taxi driver still has no idea where to go.

one of the best features of Taxi Guide Seoul is being able to share the taxi card information. You are able to send the address to people via MMS message – handy if you are meeting a group of people and need to give them directions. Finally you can create your own cards for destinations you find that Chris and his developer HoodHot have yet to discover.

The big advantage of Taxi Guide is its ability to be used off line – visitors to Seoul don’t want to be paying expensive roaming charges.

However this means some features that would otherwise be standard in an app like this are missing. Any app that deals with destinations these days needs Foursquare integration. It just makes sense that upon arrival at your destination you would “check-in”. And for the legions of people intent on sharing every aspect of their lives, Twitter is also missing. Elsewhere, Seoul is constantly changing and apps like this need frequent updates. Future updates will have to be potentially large downloads, where as a “live” app might be able to handle the dynamic nature of Seoul more efficiently. A way around this might be to make users own notes able to be uploaded and shared beyond just their friends.

the only other quibble I might have is the price. while I scored a free copy for review, HoodHot’s other apps for other destinations in Asia range from $4.99 at launch to a whopping $9.99. I would have to say I would not be prepared to pay that much for an app that has no social media integration and lacks the ability to upload and share user created information, and especially when there are a number of (albeit slightly more complicated) free alternatives, such as Google maps and even Foursquare which provide address and direction / destination information.

Bimbo Rating ★★★✩  – half a star off for lack of social, 1 star off for price.

These five Korean bloggers offer the latest on the Korean tech scene, if you’re bold enough to brave a different language environment.

I like to think that I am reasonably up to date when it comes to technology. I am an early adopter of new technology, often going to long (and expensive) extremes to acquire new gadgets and other tech goodies.

But my efforts pale in comparison to a hardcore cadre of Korean bloggers who get their hands (and cameras) on the latest and hottest technologies, sometimes before the general public does. And while these blogs are written in Korean, they’re still worth the effort, even if it is through the filter of Google Translate. Many of them link to English-language sites, their basic information is generally easy to discern, and the care they take in presenting their finds and accompanying them with high-resolution images makes them worth reading.

Read the full story

This article is by guest-blogger Jaewon Chung from the excellent K-Lit Blog subject object verb.

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I met with Shin Kyung-sook (a.k.a. Kyung-sook Shin) in the Upper West Side on March 30th, on the day Janet Maslin’s review of her novel Please Look After Mom appeared in the New York Times. We took a short trip to a nearby supermarket to pick up a copy of the paper and sat down to talk in Lincoln Center Plaza’s Avery Fisher Hall. We discussed, among other things, the U.S.-response to the release of PLAM, writer’s block, her self-understanding as an author, and the differences between the short story and the novel.

Last week, Shin’s novel hit New York Times Bestseller #14. It is by far the most commercially successful novel of Korean-language origin in the United States.

PART 1

SOV: How would you describe your novel to someone who has never heard of it?

KS: It’s about Mom. It’s about what happens when Mom goes missing, and how the children — now adults — go looking for her. That’s the simplest way to describe it. “Mom” is someone you can count on to always be there for you, and the novel explores the mental and emotional state of the family members when she disappears.

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For a humble Kiwi like me, more used to rural tea rooms than roadside diners, sitting at the counter at Johnny Rockets is more like being in a movie than a restaurant. For American expats in Korea Johnny Rockets might be more of a slice of home and a chance for a decent, hand-pulled milkshake than anything else.

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An interesting article in the JoongAng Daily about the increasing success of Korean fiction in the English language. The article corectly notes:

Translation issues, cultural barriers, lack of strategic marketing, absence of overseas networks have all been hurdles for the international success of Korean literature

The article names, of course, Kim Young-ha.  It also talks a bit about the role Imprima Publishing is playing in this success:

Imprima was also behind the distribution of “Your Republic Is Calling You” and “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself” by contemporary writer Kim Young-ha, 42, in 11 countries, including the United States. The former ranked as high as 38th on Amazon.com’s best-sellers list, becoming the first Korean novel to reach the world’s largest online bookstore’s top 100 in its “Literature & Fiction” section.

And this is true, but what that tricky “Imprima was also behind the distribution,” neglects to make clear is that ALL of the books mentioned in this article were actually published by overseas publishers.  I would ask why in the name of God does Imprima apparently NOT have an English website? In any case, as I have argued elsewhere, and credit should go to them for doing that. It is a wise approach, because these large english-speaking firms do address all of the problems noted in the first quote.

However, on the heels of this there is also this article in the Los Angeles Times which notes the decreased role of publishers as gatekeepers. This might be an unfortunate thing for Korean Literature, actually, as it is just starting to be able to get through the gate. If  that publisher  gate closes before Korean Literature is truly “in” it is difficult to see how Korea will navigate the new world. The article suggests that the new, more open, gate is going to be the internet, but this gets us back to the problem of how Korea markets itself overseas.  I note reading the article, that the authors being interviewed about internet sales are already successful – so they are already ‘marketed’ so to speak.

Korean literature would fall back to Koreans marketing it (or worse, individual authors with no handle on English), an approach which has not had much recent success. Perhaps worse, this would likely be done on the “Korean” internet – meaning lots of Active-X, websited that do not work on Firefox or Macintoshes, and taking place on Naver, Daum, and other internet portals that are completely parallel to the English-language internet and not intersective of it.  Some Korean authors who are internet savvy, again Kim Young-ha comes to mind, would do fine in this environment, but many others would fall back.

Then, Korea would virtually have to go back to a government sponsored translation model (because the talent resides there) with all the problems and unmet goals that this approach has already lead to in Korean literature; with poor translation choices made, poor publishing choices made, and poor marketing choices made.

There is, of course, another possibility – that the amazing speed of change in Korea, that Korea’s amazing commitment to internet technology and it’s apparent move towards more international standards (twitter, facebook, what have you), will actually uniquely position Korea to do this translation work. Sites such as Nanoomi.net are already pushing this kind of model forward, and if the amazing power of Korean netizens could be marshalled for good, there is no telling what might happen.

But I fear the default position, if publisher influence recedes, will be to go back to governmentalized translation approaches.

You can see the original post at Klit