Pleco, Android, and Mandarin Study

[Tianjin42]

There is a wealth of Pleco and Android information on the forums, most very useful. Given the speed of change in these areas I'd like to make further requests for information.

We have now reached the date we expected to see Pleco on Android. There are dedicated sites out there addressing such questions but we seem to have a few experts in here, and some who seem to have some guanxi with people who know, so do we have date?

I have read some of the lists on useful apps but, again due to the speed of change, invite people to suggest the best Mandarin tools for Android. I have recently bought a HTC Desire Z (here in China) and would very much like to start using pleco (or something similar - preferably with the flashcards).

Anyone else in a similar situation?

[langxia]

I don't think they are giving out a date when it will be released for android. The best way to stay informed is to go over to pleco.com or http://www.plecoforums.com/index.php to stay informed on when to expect a android version of pleco.

[mikelove]

We're not giving out any release dates, no. The first public beta release probably won't include flashcard testing support - we're aiming to let you create / organize / export them at least, but the testing part will probably have to wait for a subsequent beta.

Honestly the biggest problem is that there's simply too much interest in our Android version; we'd been hoping to do a quiet little experimental release at the end of last year (we've had a good amount of functionality working for a while now), but once it became clear how many people would be downloading that, we decided it would be too much of a distraction - too much email / too many bug reports / too many suggestions / too many people demanding tech support in spite of all of all of our various warnings / etc, at an early enough phase in development that we've got our hands full simply dealing with the bugs and functionality issues that we know about.

Also, now that so many people associate us with live OCR we wanted to make sure we had that working in the first release, which it looks like it will be. And we are making good progress, it's just tough to estimate how long everything will take when we're on a brand new platform and doing a number of things that nobody ever seems to have tried to do on Android before.

[Tianjin42]

Okay - thanks Mike. I look forward to its arrival.

To everyone else, do you have any suggestions/ experience of any other useful Mandarin applications on Android.

[Morrisons]

eStroke [www.eon.com.hk] is quite good. I used it for Traditional Chinese, but it seems to support Simplified and pinyin.

You can draw in characters, regardless of what stroke order you use, and it will recognise it, give a definition, and pinyin, jyutping Romanisation. It also allows you to practice drawing the characters.

It needs a bit of work, probably a function to write sentences for text messages etc, but it’s a pretty good little app.

[Tianjin42]

Morrisons,

thanks for that. There are a few useful ones out there so it is always good to here from someone who actually has some experience of a decent app.

[westmeadboy]

gPen is widely considered to be the best Chinese handwriting recognition system on the Android Market, and it's free. Unfortunately it does not have English localization but you should be able to get by without.