Using an iPhone & iPad in Thailand Tips, App Reviews and News for the iPhone and iPad by Richard Barrow

Bangkok Essentials for your iPhone

From major temples to young new designer shops, this guide shows you some of the city's most exciting spots to explore.

There are now quite a few guidebooks apps out there for Bangkok and Thailand. Some are better than others. The iPhone/iPad app called Bangkok ✭Essential✭ Guide is certainly one of the better ones. They claim to have about 200 entries that list things in various categories such as entertainment, food & drink, hotels, shopping and museums. 200 may sound a lot but when you consider that there are only 16 listings for hotels then you will realize that this app is far from comprehensive. But, it does have some features that I really like. The question for you is whether it is worth the $2.99 fee.

What I like is that you can quickly find what you want by first choosing a category. You can then view the results alphabetically or more interestingly, by distance. So, for this you will be able to see which hotels or museums are nearest to you. Click through to that listing and you will be given further information which includes photos and a map. It is good that both the phone number and website address is clickable  unlike the TAT apps that I reviewed earlier. If you click on the map it will show your position and the location for the listing. It will also mark the route you should take and the total distance. Interestingly, it also attempts to tell you how much it will cost by taxi. In the example at the top it says that my journey into Bangkok will cost only 137 baht. I think you might need to add another 100 baht to that just for traffic alone.

It is a decent app that makes good use of GPS. If you click on the Map tab at the bottom you will see icons for all the listings on the map as well as your own location. A number of the listings also have comments which users can send in. For example, someone commented that the Zen shopping was actually burned down a few months back. It does have a lot of potential and hopefully they will work on adding more listings.

Farang Friendly Listings

Farang (foreigner) Friendly is the definitive list of Thai and foreign owned companies in Thailand that focus on selling to expats and tourists.

One of the difficult things about coming to live in a new country is finding local businesses that can help you with the things that you need. Even expats that have been here for a while sometimes need help. This is because Thailand isn't always "farang friendly" in that English is not used as much as in other South East Asian nations. It's certainly getting better since the time that I first came here, but local telephone directories, including the Yellow Pages, are nearly always only in Thai. Coming to our rescue is this new iPhone app called simply Farang. It is basically a listing of different things from restaurants to hotels and bookshops to ice cream parlours. The listings are not limited to only Bangkok but cover areas all over Thailand. Obviously, as it is still new it is not yet comprehensive, but I was impressed with what they had already. I was also pleased to see that the ones that I was familiar with had an accurate entry.

The best thing that I like about this app is that it takes your present location and will then give a list of places starting from the ones nearest to you. So, in the examples listed above, you can see that The Erawan Museum is not far from my home. Click on the name and you are given information like address, telephone, website, and most importantly, the location on a map. It also shows where you are in relation to this place. That is great, but what happens if I want a listing of all the bookshops in Pattaya before I go there? They might need to think about giving us the option to choose our own location as well. Another small point is that it seems to keep connecting to the Internet each time that I open another listing. No problem for me as I have an unlimited data package. But, not so good for visiting tourists. However, I think this will prove in time to be a very useful app for expats in Thailand. Get it for free in the Thai iTunes store.