Nokia Dictionary with Pinyin?

[ilprincipe]

Dear all,

I just bought a great Nokia 3110 in China that has all the nice Nokia functionality, plus can send/receive SMS in Chinese, input method is both pinyin and T9/Wubi. It also has a bi-directional software, Chinese/English.

The problem I have is this dictionary is designed for Chinese people learning English, and not the other way round. So, if I want to know how to say in Chinese the word "home", I search for that and it gives me a nice translation, but ONLY SHOWS HAN ZI, no pinyin..assuming, of course that any chinese person can read most hanzi.

Do you know of a possible upgrade/new download of a dictionary that can actually display pinyin also when translating from English to Chinese?

Also, when receiving some text messages, invariably there is the odd character that I don't know..(in fact..many!)...is there a way (again through some software enchanment), to kind of "select, copy paste" that character into the dictionary search field? or Even a pop up text reader..

I am asking too much from a simple Mobile phone??

thanks

[lemur]

It is an unfortunate fact that the majority of the good portable electronic devices which contain Chinese-English or English-Chinese dictionaries are usually designed for people who speak Chinese and are trying to learn English.

I recently shopped for an electronic dictionary. I considered the idea of having a dedicated device or a PDA or a cell phone with dictionary or some other portable thing. In the end, I decided to buy PlecoDict to load onto my Treo 650 phone (which in Taiwan has reverted to being only a PDA) since it is very much adapted to the needs of English speakers trying to learn Mandarin. I bought the full version. I did not like shelling out that much money because I'm pretty conservative about spending money and with items like this I'm always concerned that I might end up finding the software too burdensome to really use but I can tell you buying PlecoDict has been well worth it.

I googled a bit for your phone model and I think it is unlikely that PlecoDict will run on it. At this time PlecoDict only runs on Palm and Windows Mobile devices. The developer has talked about the possiblity of a port to other platforms but AFAIK there is nothing concrete yet. If you want PlecoDict, maybe buying a used Palm or Windows device would be the way to go to cut down costs. I wish I knew of a solution to get a good dictionary onto your phone but this is the best I can provide right now.

[ilprincipe]

thanks for your response and advice. However, now that I am stuck with this new Nokia phone, I will just have to live with it...!

i did find some useful stuff..for example, I can look up the dictionary by inputting characters using Wubi, instead of pinyin (which is useful if I don't know how to read a specific character)..it is not too bad once you get used to it and it is perhaps a good exercise in practising stroke order.

furthermore, the nokia has a nice 'copy' function, whereby you can select portion of a text (for example from an SMS you have received) and paste it somewhere else...the thing is...strangely..I can paste it anywhere except in the dictionary look-up field..(!?)...there must be a way..