This is certainly a more modest event than the launch of the iPhone (and we hope we don’t steal too much of Steve Jobs’ thunder), but we are excited to launch our own mobile initiative today. Premium users can now access a variety of learning tools at m.spanishsense.com, and m.chinesepod.com.
The mobile sites provide…
a) Discussion, Dialogue, Key Vocabulary and Expansion Sentences for all your scheduled lessons
b) The ability to save new words to your vocabulary list
c) Vocabulary list review, and flashcards
d) The ability to access and participate in all your conversations
and we envision the typical experience to be:
Setup:
(1) Set up ‘Your Feed’ with the types of lessons and additional files you would like to receive:
(2) Subscribe to your feed in your phone’s podcast software
Use:
(1) download your lesson podcasts (via phone’s podcast software)
(2) view the lesson’s discussion, dialogue, vocabulary and expansion (via XHTML browser)
(3) review you vocabulary on the go and using the flashcards (via XHTML browser)
(4) get involved in the latest site conversations
For example:
(1) go to http://m.chinesepod.com/ and login with your username and password:
(2) choose from one of the 3 options of: lesson review, vocabulary study or conversations (just like the website!):
(3) review the lesson you just listened to:
(4) drill your saved vocabulary with the mobile flashcards:
(5) join in on the discussion and view the latest conversations:
For more information, check out our Mobile Users Guide.
We plan to gather feedback over the next month or so, but already have ideas for additional resources that could be delivered through the sites.
If you want to hear Ken and Hank discussing the new release in a bit more detail, be sure to check out today’s News and Features.
Steve
** Sunday Update **
Bart Decrem from Palo Alto sent in some shots of ChinesePod on the iPhone:
He suggested we needed to adjust the font size, but really enjoying being able to directly download the podcasts to his phone without a computer (over Wi-Fi with no additional TelCo payments).
In case you aren’t aware, you can view the mobile site on your desktop browser (well you can in Firefox anyway) if you just want to quickly check out all it’s features.
Would you consider adding a link to access the whole archive of lessons? I assume only scheduled lessons show up in the lessons section at the moment?
Or if that’s too much maybe just the 10 most recently released lessons?
I’ve only looked at it from my regular browser, but it looks good. As is often said, sometimes less is more.
One reason I only sent incomplete beta-testing feedback is I don’t subscribe to any feed, I do my own manual download so I don’t get to see any of the “scheduled lessons”, not even my Practice Plan lessons show up.
I agree that less can often be more (in terms of u/i frills) but I don’t see why there wouldn’t be full search capabilities on the mobile platform, I have built my own custom site that does the job on a mobile browser. And it’s somewhat limiting to have to subscribe to a feed to get the corresponding lessons. I’ll try again though.
to be perfectly clear, my Lessons screen is empty. Vocab displays ‘vocab w 0 tags’ and ‘all vocab’, fine. Conversations are also fine.
This looks like a great interface for everybody, not just those with networked mobile devices. Everyone who says “look mate, I just want to pick up my stuff and go” might be able to benefit from that lean look sometimes.
Things are probably different in the USA, but at $15.00 per mebabyte download (yes that’s about $150.00 per mp3) there’s no way I’d be able to use a networked mobile device when I’m out and about. If it was really cheap, yeah, that might be different, certainly worth a try.
Nottaworry, I already do everything on my PDA, the whole bang lot, and have done so for over a year, with more mobility than I’d have if tied to our patchy networks, and at no extra cost. A few scripts to download and do some awkward conversions overnight, then it’s a simple matter of copying the bundle to my PDA each morning, and I have more than enough for the next 24 hours of fun. Whether I’m strolling in a remote valley or in a building that bans mobile devices or travelling through kilometres of railway tunnel blockout, nothing can stop me. That’s M-Learning, Aussie style, and we’ve been doing M-Learning that way for years.
I reckon what you have started here is N-Learning.
I have the same prohibitive pricing problems as AuntySue here in Europe as I am shuttling regularly between Frankfurt and Geneva: you can obtain reasonably priced packages national (e.g. 5GB for 35€ per month), but as soon as you go abroad they charge you - cutely phrased - 0,69€ per 10kB, which translates about to the same horror-sum as in Australia.
A typical feature of Europe is that abroad starts round the corner.
Still I appreciate that you develop the content in a generic way, so offering one side of this hen&egg-problem: which needs to be there first: content and then the pricing offers will follow or the other way round?
REG - I like it for regular use. Nice and simple.
Can I do this in China?
Lantian,
Nothing stopping you from viewing m.chinesepod.com on any browser - traditional, mobile or otherwise. We are just trying to optimize it for iPhone-like devices. Wi-Fi would be the preferred network of access, but until such devices become more prevalent here on the mainland, GPRS is the mobile network of choice.
These are the current data rates for China Mobile and China Unicom:
中国移动 GPRS套餐（按流量）
20元 50M 超出部分0.01元
100元 800M 超出部分0.01元
200元 2000M 超出部分0.01元 封顶500元
标准套餐 0.03元/KB
中国联通130 GPRS套餐（按流量）
10元 100M 超出部分0.005元 封顶500元
标准套餐 0.01元/KB
WAP套餐（按时间收费，但只可浏览，不可下载）
7:00am-9:00pm 0.1元/分钟
9:00pm-7:00am 0.05/分钟
I’m wondering what the big thing is about the iPhone other than a marketing blitz? what does it fundamentally do that other smartphones don’t?
If the answer is, the same as iPod did to the mp3 market then fine, will blow the ‘30% of phones being smartphones by 2010′ forecast…
VIEWS - Hi Hank, thanks for the info on the GPRS rates. Too bad there is no flat rate, at the rate I consume Cpod, I’ll burn thru a lot of kuai…
Right now I have taken a liking to viewing the conversations via the m.chinesepod site. Unlike Netvibes (and GoogleReader, Yahoo) I can see the entire comments, and unlike the Cpod view, I can also see who the comment is from along with the whole comment. It’s been real relaxing pursuing!
Is there a way to see the last ten lessons in m.Cpod? It seems only to give my scheduled lessons, but to be honest, I don’t schedule.
I think I might just start shopping for a new phone.
TRANSITION - also just wanted to say how nice this ‘upgrade’ was. There was no impact on current users, pretty much everything seems to work, deng deng. NICE.
It’s like going back to the good’ol days, today. Alpha is better. http://au.alpha.yahoo.com/
Hey, this was the final push to give my old phone into repair…
Besides design, style, and carriability and maybe usability there is hardly anything the IPhone has that my good old brick hasn’t. Theoretically I am even supposed to do videoconferencing with it, but I still lack a partner Would such calls be included in Practice?
I got 30 MB per month download - so far I *never* got beyond 10 MB (and I was often looking at lesson comments at the standard layout). The game changes if I started downloading lessons. Some of our students have UMTS-flatrates, they could do it.
If only my browser would display those Hanzi.
I just have problems viewing 3rd tone pinyin letters on my phone.
Lantian,
When you subscribe to future episodes of lessons they should also be added to Scheduled Lessons. We are working on a round of revisions on how we handle lesson management and this change will be part of it.
Bazza, I guess everyone has problems viewing pinyin 3rd tones on 240×320 or small screen sizes at 8 or less point size…
Does the iPhone support Chinese input/display? Inquiring minds want — no, need — to know!
goulnik, no, I think Bazza has the same problem which I do. It’s not a question of visibility but that any letter with the third tone only shows up as an empty box.
Using a Nokia N95, I’m seeing uninterpreted markup appearing in the text of some (not all) lessons, eg:
ChinesePodHi Dave in Taiwan,
- anything i need to configure to get round that? I see the N95 is supposedly in the list of supported devices…
.. oops. That example didn’t come out right. How about this:
ChinesePodHi Dave in Taiwan,
No. Oh well. Suffice to say, I’m seeing markup elements in the rendered page.
FUTURE LESSONS - A couple days ago in My Feed settings at the Cpod site I checked all the Future nLesson checkboxes. Today, I took another look at my m.chinesepod home page/lessons and future lessons do not yet appear there.
Am I not selecting something correctly?
I would like the last five episodes to show up at my m.cpod home page/lessons.
Lantian, just checked with the team and they said that the only lessons that will show up on that tab is your scheduled lessons (lessons you’ve actually dragged onto the calendar).
Jazz, is there any way you can get us a ahot of that error that you see on your nokia N95, we’d really appreciate it (just send it to chinesepod [at] gmail dot com.
I don’t schedule lessons because I just listen to them as they’re released, and obviously you can’t schedule future lessons because don’t exist yet.
can’t agree more with Bazza, this whole scheduling business only works for some people. My comments are generally quite supportive but here, as a premium 6-months practice plan subscriber I really feel I’m subsidizing the community while not getting the best value.
Why on earth do I have to drag ‘future’ lessons into the calendar, can’t the Latest Lessons be flagged for automatic scheduling? And why can’t my practice plan lessons (equally scheduled) be automatically pulled in?
Yv, Bazza,
my scheduling works fine.
I usually call it “Excel”
Oh, and I would love to see the upcoming lessons. That really helped distributing time (1 Media eats 5 Intermediates or 2 Advanced).
Lantian,
You are doing everything correctly. It is just a bug. Right now, the check boxes only affect what shows up in your RSS feed, but obviously it would be nice if they also controlled what was in your scheduled lessons on the calendar and on ChinesePod Mobile.
They are working on it now and hopefully will have it updated in the next day or two.
I will keep you updated.
H.
ok, no response on the scheduling of practice plan… never mind, the bug Hank referred to seems to have been fixed, and so I was able to work things out from there through my own mashup and access all lessons. The mobile site is indeed very cool
MOBILE FUTURE - FYI the lessons show up now in my m.cpod Lessons view now.
We got the mobile site updated, but held off on the My Schedule updates since they would take a bit longer. We are planning some changes to the study home page so will update the scheduling then.
What I really found I missed after switching from a Palm to an iPhone was the wonderful PlecoDict and it’s flashcard system. I had hoped that m.chinesepod.com’s flashcards would make up for it a bit, but it’s just too laggy to use unless I’m on WiFi due to each tap hitting the web page.
So after trying it, I wrote my own that uses a little javascript and is optimized for the iPhone. It’s missing meaningful features and has no integration with Chinesepod (uses the horrifying CEDICT and some HSK stuff I found lying around…how I miss the ABC dict). But at least it allows me to kill some time with some learning.
The URL is: http://hanziphone.com/iflash.html
It only works meaningfully on the iPhone at this point. The code is horrible (mix of Javascript and Perl) but if anyone wants it, I’m more than happy to provide if they can do a better job of scratching this itch than I did.
Oh, and I’m not sure why, but the iPhone RSS reader doesn’t like my personal RSS feed. Just errors out. The main feed works fine.
Clayton
Clayton Donley, what made you decide to swirch to the iPod, I mean, you knew you would no longer be able to use PlecoDict and it’s not just the flashcards, but also handwriting recognition, the NWP dictionary etc. I for one couldn’t do without
I actually use Pleco still on a TX now rather than my Treo, but it’s really the only thing I use on the Palm.
Why switch?
1. Better over-the-air podcasts (I used QuickNews plus PocketTunes or Kinoma, but they were all buggy to some degree - I found Quicknews to be the worst offender, though I think a lot of it was just the Palm OS that they were fighting with).
2. Web browser - The Treo web browser barely works. Add in CJKOS not supporting Unicode/UTF-8 and the Chinese web browsing experience is miserable. The iPhone has (from a browsing standpoint) the best Chinese experience possible. I mean, the entire FULL Chinesepod site renders completely and if I’m on WiFi at an airport or such, it does so about as fast as my desktop. It’s missing a Chinese IME at the moment, but figure it’s just a matter of time and most of the sites I’d want an IME wouldn’t even load on my Palm anyway. For example, on the Treo 700p with CJKOS enabled I couldn’t even get Google to load most of the time!
3. PDF Transcripts that include Chinese read nicely, as do Word documents. No extra plugins and lack of stability. No ulti-step processes of converting or downloading with Web/Blazer and opening with another app, etc..
So basically the Palm works well as a dictionary. The iPhone worked better for everything else. When in China, I tend to use an unlocked Nokia phone for the Q9 support. I think Nokia actually makes a better phone in many cases, but I already knew that they didn’t support Pleco either, so it didn’t make much difference.
So there you have it.
Clayton
makes sense, though my HTC phone (WM5) with a good browser (Opera) does all of this too…
question to Hank, is there going to be a mobile version of this blog?
My lessons list on the mobile site now shows just the last 5 lessons is that right?
3rd tones seem to work ok now.
Would you be able to add a “Jump to end” link on the discussions pages? If there’s about 100 comments and you just want to read the latest ones it can take a while to scroll to the bottom.
It’s probably not possible, but it would also be very cool if it had dialogue audio clips, or just one clip of the whole dialogue.
Another variant. Using a China Mobile Motorola SLVR (L7) and its preloaded Monternet browser, all 3rd tone pin yin letters, with the exception of e, show up as black boxes.
is there any way I can get this free for my mogul?