By popular request, we’ll soon be including integrated Google Maps in our iPhone metro map apps for Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Singapore. Just tap on any station and choose “Street map” to see the area around the selected station. You can pan and zoom the map to see more.

If you’ve got any suggestions on this or other features, do get in touch!

Stay tuned for updates to all our apps to support Google maps over the next few weeks.

To download the maps, just click on the “PDF map” tab on any of our city sites, or follow the download links below. The PDF maps are available in both English and Chinese versions. If you have any feedback or spot any mistakes on the map, do get in touch!

Direct links:

• Shanghai – English, Chinese
• Beijing – English, Chinese
• Guangzhou – English, Chinese
• Hong Kong – English, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional
• Singapore – English, Chinese

Ten great reasons to get Explore Hong Kong:

Hurry! Download Explore Hong Kong from the iTunes App Store now! Sale ends Sunday 21st March!

So, you’ve got route planning for all journeys on the MTR network with times and prices, offline access, station names in English, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese, and free updates for life!

We think Explore Hong Kong is the best Hong Kong MTR app for iPhone and iPod touch. The app is fully up to date with the latest information, including new stations at LOHAS Park and Austin which opened in late 2009.

Explore Hong Kong is available on the iTunes App Store today priced at just $0.99. Want to try it out for free? Follow us on Twitter or become our fan on Facebook where we’ll be handing out some free promo codes!

Read on for some sample screenshots:

• ExploreHK update – our Hong Kong map got some love, with a fully-updated routeplanner including the new station at Austin and changes to the East and West Rail Lines.
• New audio for Hong Kong and Guangzhou – now you can hear how any station name sounds just by clicking on the station name, then pressing the “play” button. For Hong Kong, you can practice your Cantonese
• Nearby places in Metropedia. For every station in the Shanghai Metropedia/Beijing Subwaypedia/Guangzhou Metropedia/Hong Kong MTRpedia, we now show a “Places near” section with links to local places’ Wikipedia articles. This is a new feature so feedback is very welcome!

And coming soon…

• An Explore Hong Kong iPhone app! Browse, search and plan routes across the MTR network.
• Updates to all our other iPhone apps, including bugfixes and enhanced search results.
• Up-to-date exit maps for each station, showing nearby roads and transport links

Stay tuned for further announcements, but until then here’s a screenshot to whet your appetite (click to enlarge)!

If you’d like to be notified when we launch our apps for Beijing, Guangzhou or Hong Kong, leave a message on our contact page.

Log on to ExploreShanghai at 10:33pm and you’ll see something like this: the greyed out stations are already closed, while the white stations still have train services.

Of course, you can click on a station to get detailed information about the timetable for individual lines.

Other recent improvements

• Search box now works correctly when switching languages
• Tabs fixed on the Guangzhou Metropedia

The navigation bar at the top of the screen has been simplified to give you quick access to the two most popular areas of the site: the interactive map and “pedia”.

The other navigation options can be found in the “More” dropdown. You can contact us, or quickly jump to the map for another city.

If you go directly to the root of a site (for example http://www.exploreshanghai.com/ we’ll now automatically detect from your browser if you’d prefer the English or Chinese version of the map. If you want to switch, just use this dropdown in the upper right. There’s also quick access to help in any language.

Behind the scenes we’ve made some major changes to integrate all four metro maps (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong), and added support for additional languages, so making improvements to the maps in the future should be much quicker and easier. Look out for more announcements in the next few months.

The map is available in English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. There’s also all the features you’ve come to expect from our maps, including:

First and last train details for every station

• A routeplanner showing time and price for all journeys
• The MTRpedia with detailed pages for every line and station, including maps and local photos
• Pronunciation for every station (in Cantonese!)

Visit ExploreHK.com to try out our new site!