CE-Star/Monster SIP for Pocket PC

[Maqqie]

Hey Guys. I will be heading to Shanghai in just under a weeks time from today and I have coincidentally bought a new smart phone (the Samsung Omnia II [i8000]). However, the phone (which uses Windows Mobile 6.1 as an operating platform) does not, by default, support simplified chinese characters.

I have searched online and found two different softwares that I can install to allow the phone to write and recognise chinese characters, CE-Star and Monster SIP. I stumbled across these softwares only by accident so I was wondering what other peoples' views were on these two softwares? Are there any other similar but better softwares available? CE-Star looks good and seems to be most popular but I heard it is a little buggy and does not run well with the Samsung Omnia II.

Thanks in advance.

Maqqie:clap

[Xiwang]

I bought CE-Star even though I saw that the on-line reviews were mixed. I eventually gave up using it because of the bugs. For example, whenever I used it, it changed the keyboard settings on my phone, which then required me to take the battery out and put it back in each time in order to return to my original settings.

The Mobem website has a copyright date of 2007 so I don't know what's going on, if anything, with this product. I do know that I didn't get any response when I sent an Email requesting technical assistance.

The website seems to offer a trial version of the product. If you're interested in it, I would recommend that you try it out before spending any money.

At the moment, I'm not using any Chinese input software.

http://www.mobem.com/index.php

[mikelove]

The best bet on this nowadays is generally to combine two techniques:

1) Use "font linking" to enable Chinese support on your system. The widely-available "Sunglobe" font file installer includes the necessary registry hacks for this, or if you search around for information on font linking there should be lots of guides out there.

2) Download a Chinese input system that doesn't include character display support - these are a lot newer / more frequently updated than CE-Star et al. The two most popular ones at the moment seem to be ZTA4 and PlumSip - both are free (or seem to be, even from their manufacturers' websites) and should be easy to find online.

[Maqqie]

Does font linking require any porgramming? I am a bit nervous about editing system critical files and would prefer a stand alone install if possible.

[Sarevok]

Not necessarily, you can find the sunglobe font as a ready-made sunglobe.cab package, which does the registry hacking automatically, no programming magic needed...

also, check this Cameron guy's blog. He has put together a method of running all three CJK IMEs at the same time, accompanied by pretty detailed instructions. You can choose to install all three, or only one of them if Japanese and Korean doesn't interest you (in that case, I would definitely use sunglobe over that korechithai font suggested by Cameron - sunglobe looks way better for Chinese). You can combine it with ZTA4, which you'll want to do if you also want to use handwriting recognition for Chinese (not included in ZTA4).

ZTA4 is also a little wacky sometimes (but maybe that's just my machine... or the wild combination with Japanese IME... or the current temperature and humidity, who knows ), which leads to occassional soft-resets... but way more stable than CE-Star imho...