Herald Media strives to become the nation’s best and very first provider for a variety of mobile services, including news and lifestyle guides.

The Korea Herald, which has the largest circulation in Korea among English language dailies, introduced the country’s first English mobile news alert service, “Herald Topic,” last September. The service sends three text messages a day in the form of an English headline and the Korean translation of a key word, a format aimed at students and business people who want to learn English through real-time headline updates.

“It is an effective way to learn English because each day I can read important news of the day in an English format with a Korean translation for a keyword,” said 38-year-old businessman Han Jung-hoon. 

Furthermore, The Korea Herald and The Herald Business are leading digital newspapers included in the Textore service for Samsung’s tablet PC Galaxy Tab. The Korea Herald is the very first English daily to make it to the Galaxy Tab. The “Readers hub” icon on Samsung’s Galaxy Tab instantly brings readers to the paper’s different sections. Flipping through the sections and pages on the mobile devices, readers can get The Herald Business and The Korea Herald on the go.

To create a better reading experience, The Korea Herald Galaxy Tab service comes with a text-to-voice facility and a built-in dictionary. Readers can sharpen their English skills by finding the meaning of the words in news articles and listening to the news.

Herald Media launched the nation’s first mobile art app, “artday,” which is increasingly popular among both Android and Apple smartphone users. The Herald Business, which offers readers with in-depth reports on a wide array of news events, succeeded in becoming the nation’s first digital newspaper to provide readers with the photo gallery effect.

The mobile art application artday provides extensive information on 300 art exhibitions and galleries around Seoul and other major cities in the country. In addition, artday also offers users discount coupons for art cafes and products, plus objective user reviews. The number of app downloads topped 500,000 within the first fourth months.

By Moon Ye-bin (Yebinm@heraldcorp.com)