In the three weeks since the launch of the new iPhone, a series of free Talking Phrasebooks developed by Coolgorilla and sponsored by lastminute.com have received over 350,000 downloads to become some of the most popular applications on the new device.

Currently available in French, German, Italian and Spanish, the intuitive applications make embarrassing pronunciation attempts a thing of the past as the iPhone speaks selected foreign phrases using recordings of real native speakers.
 
Thanks to a savvy sponsorship deal with internet travel and leisure pioneers lastminute.com, the applications are free to download whilst other publishers charge customers $9.99 for similar products. In comparison, based on the same purchase price, lastminute.com and Coolgorilla have already given away over $3.5 million of free software.
 
“Customer feedback has been immense. We’ve had hundreds of emails from iPhone users thanking us for the phrasebooks and asking us for new languages which will be available soon.” Commented Roy Forsdick Managing Director at Coolgorilla who has promised Portuguese and Greek versions of the phrasebooks will be available by the end of August.
 
But you don’t need the latest iPhone or iPod Touch to make use of the Talking Phrasebooks. Nokia and Sony Ericsson users can also download the phrasebooks directly to their handsets by visiting www.coolgorilla.mobi from their mobile phone. And for those of you who are sticking with their trusty iPods, all six languages can also be downloaded as a super-enhanced Podcast via iTunes.