PDA's - Chinese/Japanese

[Harvey]

Hi guys,

I am currently living in Japan and for my PDA needs I have been using devices purchased in Japan. These can handle Japanese, and English characters without trouble. However I am planning to move to China soon, and would like to have a PDA which can handle Japanese, Chinese, and English characters as well.

Does anyone have any advice?

- Harvey

[Peng Taili]

My Sony Clie does English-Chinese-Korean. I imagine that Japanese would be no problem if I were to load it on to it.

[geraldc]

Palm based PDAs are pretty good, and if you install CJKOS, it can handle Chinese, Japanese and Korean. http://www.dyts.com/en/products.html

[Harvey]

I like Palm PDA's, I currently use a rusty Palm m505.

Is this the same you have mentioned?

http://www.dyts.com/en/index.html

Wow reading the site you mentioned it seems it even will support my m505. Amazing. I'll have to give this a try.

(darn, was looking for an excuse to upgrade before I move to China... might not be necessary...)

[malinuo]

You may want to upgrade anyhow. Palm-users in China often have http://pleco.com/plecodict.html English-Chinese dictionary installed, and I think that one needs a little more than your m505. You don't need to buy it in Japan though. You can buy Palms in China (or could at least a year ago).

[smalltownfart]

Hmmm, lots of PalmOS fans in this forum, apparently.

Question for palm CJK users, can both Japanese and Chinese be

displayed at the same time? e.g. if the OP receives emails in

both languages, will he have to switch around the settings before

he can read emails in each language?

I know that PalmOS cannot display, for example, Arabic and Chinese

on the same document. That's because PalmOS doesn't support unicode,

so you basically have to use a "default character set" that will map multibyte

chars to the correct characters via some software such as CJKOS.

The problem with this approach is that you cannot support map more than 1 character set

at a time, but maybe there is some CJK software for palm out there that can

hack around this, at least for the 3 languages - Chinese, Korean & Japanese.

For the record, PocketPC supports Unicode, and in my opinion would be

the better choice for border-hopping types

The good thing abt PalmOS is that devices are very cheap, there was a

Canadian site selling refurbished M130 (color) Palms for CDN $20 CDN ( US $17-$18 )

recently.

It's basically a dead-end platform

(don't hate me for I speak the truth - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5203 )

but you can find lots of useful older software.

[malinuo]

I have saved a few Japanese files as GBK, and so far all characters I have looked at on the Palm are OK. That said, I have a big problem with CJKOS and Japanese: you cannot type anything but hiragana and katakana with the Japanese input methods.

It is really sad that Palm have not come up with a truly multilingual system.

[roddy]

It is really sad that Palm have not come up with a truly multilingual system.

Sad and stupid. I can't even view UTF-8 Chinese webpages on my T5, which is ridiculous. This is the sole reason I'm considering changing to a PocketPC device once Pleco has an 'official' release of the PPC version of Plecodict.

[mikelove]

Well as of today, we do - 1.0 for Pocket PC was just posted. If history is any guide we'll likely turn up at least a few more bugs now that the product is going out to a much wider audience, but this should at least be comparable to the 1.0.1 release on Palm, and if we do find bugs we should be able to mop them up pretty quickly. (nothing else to do programming-wise until we finish the specs for version 2)

On the more general subject of this thread, Unicode support was supposedly going to be part of Palm OS Cobalt, but now that that isn't happening I don't know what its future is going to be like on Palm OS for Linux - they'd have to rewrite a lot of the APIs, and they might not feel like that's worth it when Palm OS is essentially becoming little more than a glorified application framework for embedded Linux.

So Pocket PC probably is the better horse to bet on for Unicode support. But Pocket PC's multilingual support is far from perfect: Chinese word wrapping was broken until Windows Mobile 5, and the font linking system is still a poor shadow of the desktop version - without a total-coverage font like Arial Unicode it's still difficult to get Arabic and Chinese on the same page. (actually, with Arabic specifically it would probably be impossible because of the right-to-left issue)