Which Chinese digitizer or tablet do you use?

[Zamenhof]

Like many other beginners, I'm struggling every time I have to look up a complicated character in the dictionary. That's why I want a digitizer/tablet/digital pen (or whatever it's called), so I can simply draw the character and have my computer tell me what it means.

I'm in China for a couple of weeks, so I figure that this is a good place to buy such a digitizer. The big question is which one. The stores have MANY so I'd love to hear from people who have hands-on experience. Hanwang seems to be a famous brand here. Is it any good? I've also seen a Penpower demonstated. It looked alright.

I have a few points on my wishlist:

1. I wan't room enough on the tablet to get all details right, but I don't want a monster on my desk. In other words, the area outside the active area shouldn't be too big.

2. Price is an issue. It shouldn't cost more than 300-400 yuan. Otherwise I would prefer to buy one of the expensive Wacoms in my home country.

3. I would like it to be bundled with useful software. I've seen a nice program in the stores that shows your writing enlarged on the screen and pronounce the character. A Chinese-English dictionary would also be nice.

4. I want it to perfectly integrate with my English Windows XP. I don't want to manipulate with unicode settings and things like that since it usually screws up other programs. I have had bad expeciences with non-Unicode Chinese software in the past.

So there you have it. Hopefully you can help me complete an otherwise wonderful trip to China.

[roddy]

While I can't comment on the actual physical tablets, I've used both Penpower and Hanwang recognition on PDA (Plecodict runs Hanwang, for those who don't know), and Hanwang comes out a clear winner.

[mikelove]

Admittedly I'm a little biased here, since Hanwang is one of our closest business partners, but their physical tablets are very nice, particularly the wired version included in the intermediate (中....) set. There seems to be a lot less wasted border space than in the Wacom ones.

The software bundles vary wildly, but I have yet to see a Chinese handwriting input system from any company with really good Unicode support; doesn't seem to be a priority, since 99% of their customers are running Chinese versions of Windows anyway. Your best bet on that might actually be to use the handwriting recognizer in Microsoft's New Phonetic IME, which is built into Windows XP; it's one of the input methods available for "Chinese (Traditional)", you set it up just like you would the Microsoft Pinyin IME or another input method, bring up the Language Bar, and choose "IME Pad" from the Tools menu to get a free, Unicode-friendly handwriting recognizer that handles both simplified and traditional characters. Not as accurate as Hanwang's system, but if easy system integration is important to you then it might be a good choice.

[Zamenhof]

Thank you for your replies. I'll take a closer look on Hanwang, but still keep PenPower in mind since they use Wacom boards. Then at least the hardware side should be compatible with my European Windows.

Yesterday, I tried a (to me) no-name brand and a PenPower (or actually Wenming, but I guess it's the same?) in a store, and I was actually impressed by both systems. I had expected a certain amount of learning time, but both boards understood my scrawl instantly.

Maybe this question deserves a separat post (and it likely already has several), but which Chinese-English dictionary would be the perfect companion to the tablet? I would like to avoid having to copy-paste too much.