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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.

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By anne.oeldorfhirsch on Flickr

One of my favorite new blogs is I’m No Picasso, because she provides a smart, engaging, and thoughtful female perspective on life in Korea.  She has a recent post titled “I’m No Picasso.  I’m also No Dating Blogger” where she calls the Korea blogosphere, and particularly the Dave’s comment boards, to task for being overwhelmingly male… it kind of reminded me of this video: “X-Box Girls Get Revenge” where at least one of those sexist asses populating the internet gets his comeuppance.

The other thing I loved was this paragraph plus change:

Ladies, my question is, what are you doing? I know you’re out there. I know you are insightful and intelligent and well-spoken. I know you have valid things to say about your experiences here in the ROK. Which is not to say that the dating bloggers aren’t doing that — they absolutely are. But that’s only one aspect of our experience here. Don’t tell me that it’s the only way we’re capable of expressing ourselves, or that it’s the only source of interest we have in paying any attention to each other. Community is what you make of it, and so far, ours hasn’t been very strong.

Not that it’s easy. You’ll all (the women, I mean) know exactly what I mean when I reference the boys’ club aspect of life here as a female expat.

Chris in South Korea has a list of female K-bloggers, which he keeps updated, as far as I know, and I once made a call out for female K-bloggers before, but I’d love to hear if there are other awesome ones I should add to my reader, and all y’all female bloggers: heed INP’s words, and get y’all connected!

You can read the complete post at Roboseyo. Creative Commons license: Give me credit and a link, share it freely, and don’t try to make money from it. More here.

By now you must know that we’re awesome dancers: if you haven’t seen our K Pop specials, or Simon’s awesome breakdancing skills, then you’re missing out on intense awesomeness. But you’re here now so you’re in luck! Two days ago it was Chuseok, which means that Seoul is a lot more empty than usual, as many people visit their hometowns and their families. Since it was so empty, we decided to dress up in costumes and dance our asses off in public. Simon was a dragon. Martina was a unicorn. Spudgy was a – Spudgy (he refused to take part in the dancing because we totally weirded him out). The day was awesome, and so was our dancing. We went to Myeongdong, Seoul Station, and Hongdae and danced until we got exhausted. Some people gathered round to watch us dance, which was very awkward, but fun at the same time. Some people even recognized us, which was even more awkward, because they were like “hey! You’re eatyourkimchi! What the hell are you doing?”

Enough about that. Check out our dancing and tell us you’re not totally amazed! If you don’t hear from us in a couple of weeks it will probably be because we were hired by SM Entertainment and JYP to be professional dancers. Or because we got arrested for public lunacy. Whatever comes first!

For the original post, check out our Life in Korea blog, and check our Facebook page tomorrow for bonus footage!

It’s time for another edition of Kpop Music Mondays! Last week we reviewed “SHINee’s Lucifer.” This week we review one of 2NE1’s three new songs, “Can’t Nobody” Read the full story

If you plan to live in Korea, especially if you want to teach in Korea, you will inevitably, somehow or someway, come across Starcraft. It’s inescapable. Starcraft is big in Korea. So big that there are professional Starcraft leagues, where people make a living off of playing Starcraft. So big that there are studies being done to treat Starcraft addiction. So, we decided – in our attempt to be more Korean – to start getting into Starcraft.

For those of you who don’t know what Starcraft is, it’s a real-time strategy game. You’re supposed to gather resources and buy an army big enough to beat your opponent into submission. The premise is simple, but, boyyyy, the execution is hard. Simon’s been playing it now for something like a week steady, and he’s still just as bad as when he started. To play well, or at least to play to the point of not getting obliterated instantly, you have to know at least a few Starcraft Strategies, and hopefully have a decent Actions Per Minute. In other words, Starcraft is almost inaccessible to newbies, unless you’re dedicated enough to practice it for a long time and hopefully, HOPEFULLY not lose within the first five minutes from a Zerg rush.

Unfortunately, we can’t play on the Korean servers. When you play Starcraft 2, you need to have an account with Battle.net, which is how you play Starcraft 2 online. Since we got our version of the game in Canada, we’re playing on the North American servers, and can’t log in to the Korean Battle.net servers with our existing accounts. Bummer! So we haven’t actually played Starcraft in Korea against someone Korean, but we’re hoping that we can do so through friend code. So, if you’re mean enough to want to whoop us at Starcraft, or kind enough to offer some pointers (we really need help!), leave us a comment below, or send us an email over at our Contact Page and we’ll add you to our Starcraft friends list. Huzzah!

You can see the original post at Eat Your Kimchi.

In case you didn’t know, we were recently in Toronto for three weeks for our summer vacation. Oh, how we missed Canada! Funny thing is, when we were in Canada, we missed Korea as well. We felt kinda homesick, in a reverse homesick kinda twisted way. Luckily for us, since we were in Toronto there were two different Koreatowns for us to visit to get our fix for Korean culture.

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This is the third, and final, part of a brief series looking at Google’s Android mobile Operating System and its success (or otherwise) in Korea.

So I’ve looked at Android in general, and already those stats are beginning to look a bit shoddy as news came out this week that Android handsets are outselling Apple’s iPhone. I’ve also gone into a brief history of Android in Korea, and indeed looked into our crystal ball at one rumour that I would like to come to fruition. In this final post I’m going to look at arguably the most important part of the whole equation – especially in terms of handset sales and market dominance – Content.

Its one thing to have a flash whizz bang handset, but if you can only make calls on it you may as well go back to your Motorola RAZR. Smartphones are all about doing more. Some have called them mini computing platforms, still others have shied away from this moniker, but everyone agrees that smartphones are excellent for content consumption.

Enter Tatter & Media, a blog aggregation, curation, organisation, and among other things design, company which I am affiliated with through Nanoomi. TatterMedia (for short) curates so-called “power bloggers” in Korean-language K-Blogland who discuss all manner of subjects in their respective fields of interest.

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This is the first part of two three looking at the current state of Android, Google’s mobile operating system, both around the world, and in Korea.

Android continues its onslaught in terms of sales of handsets around the world, and the same is about to happen in Korea with Samsung’s Galaxy S, and to a lesser extent the Nexus One being pushed by KT as well as LG’s Optimus offerings.

While Apple and its iOS claims the largest share of smartphone operating systems, Android continues its rapid growth and will eventually challenge Apple on the basis of the number of different handsets available, versus Apple’s one.

This is how the market looked recently, courtesy of Mashable:

“Other” being RIM’s Blackberry OS, Nokia’s various implementations of Symbian, WebOS from Palm/HP and whatever Windows Mobile phones are being sold out there.

While Android may constitute less than 25% of the current market, expect that to grow considerably over the next 6 to 12 months on the back of there being so many different handsets from different handset manufacturers entering the market space, as opposed to Apple’s single-model offering (which will probably maintain its dominance despite the influx of different Android offerings).

Another interesting aspect of comparing the different platform shares in the market is what version consumers are using. Both Android and Apple have arguably 4 versions of their operating systems available. Apple users are split pretty much 50/50 between the current 4.x release of iOS and its predecessor 3.x — the latter being the playground of the jailbreakers and unlockers out there.

By contrast Android users are all over the place in terms of version, a result of not being able to upgrade earlier, underpowered hardware, and also just because of the sheer number of different hardware iterations – something that Google and manufacturers need to address if they are to grow their market share.

So it looks like Android is beginning to embark on a long and probably protracted battle against Apple’s iOS and, to a lesser extent, other smartphone operating systems on the market.

The second part of this (short) series on Android will look at how Android is doing in Korea, and some of the distinctly Korean reactions to it, and the rise of smartphones in general.