Dianzi Cidian

[CK8854]

Hi, I'm wondering if anybody can recommend a good pocket electronic dictionary/translator for Mandarin chinese from/to English? I currently use a Besta N910, which serves me very well. Most importantly I need the ability to write a character on the screen with a stylus and have the thing identify what it is, but I would also appreciate some of the following features:

- Color back-lit screen

- Toneless pinyin input (similar to what one can to in programs like wenlin)

- Possibility to add other languages (cantonese)

I would appreciate any feedback you guys have.

Thanks,

C.

[NewDominion]

If you happen to have a PDA, I strongly, strongly recommend Pleco's downloadable dictionary at http://www.pleco.com. I'm pretty happy with it - it meets the first two criteria you listed. It's fairly accurate with character recognition (provided, in my experience, you have a reasonable stroke order - part of the recognition seems to be counting how many times you touch the pen to the screen), you can do both toneless pinyin and pinyin w/ tones if you're very confident simply by adding the tone number to the syllable i.e. ni3hao3. Of course, since it's on a plan pilot, it's backlit.

[ipsi()]

You can also do a part-pinyin, part-character search (e.g. if you search for 有de, it will come up with 有的、有得、有德, and 3+ length entries starting with these characters).

It's a wonderful product, which I would highly recommend. So yeah. Go have a look.

Having said that, I've never used anything else like the Besta.

[youpii]

I never saw a Chinese electronic dictionary with Toneless pinyin input, so I bought the KuaiYiDian V680 and added a custom pinyin toneless dictionary that I did from the Stardict Contemporary Chinese Dictionary