Along with others who've posted on the Dopod, I want to add a few thoughts on the Chinese-interface version of the Dopod (S900 Touch Diamond) in relation to Pleco, which I've run for several years on a Palm Tungsten T5 ... I've been playing with the Dopod S900 for a few days now, comparing it to the Palm experience ...
- "Diamond" I think refers to the raised pyramid-style backplate of the Dopod S900 phone, which I suppose is a good way to add protection for the rear-facing camera lens, but one perhaps unintended consequence is that the phone does not lie flush on a flat surface ... So if you place the phone on the table and try to write on the touch screen, the phone's body tends to wobble as you press down with the stylus ... You could use your other hand to stabilize the thing, but that's a little awkward ... I guess the designers figured everyone would be holding the phone while inputting, but apps like Pleco are input intensive ...
- Convergence is great, I can now walk around with a single device that lets me make phone calls, send/receive text messages in Chinese, run Pleco, etc. ... But I can't seem to figure out how to leverage convergence when I most need it ... For example, if I'm writing a text message and I look up a word in Pleco, I can copy that word to the Pleco buffer, but I don't see any way to insert that character into an outgoing text message field, since there's no "copy and paste" associated with writing an outgoing text message .. (I'm using the resident text message editor)... Conversely, I can't copy words in a text message I've received and paste them into Pleco ...
- I experienced several hard resets of the Dopod S900 as I poked around with Pleco running in the background while I was receiving and sending text messages ...
- The guys in the store threw in a free Kingston 1GB microSD, but when I got home I found there isn't any way to install it in the phone ... I wondered about that as I was resetting the Dopod a second or third time ...
- Having installed the full Pleco (ABC, NWP, Oxford C-E and the engine), I noticed a perceptible drag on overall memory, the clock and calendar came up more slowly, the TouchFlo feature was slower ... Pleco seems to run fine, though, and as renovator says, the display is awesome, bright and clear through that tempered glass, although now when I Iook at the Palm version of Pleco, the text seems huge compared to the Dopod! ...
- In terms of inputting in Pleco on the Dopod S900, in the "draw hanzi" Chinese mode (马兰花输入 ma lan hua shu ru), when you first bring up the screen you sometimes can't begin drawing hanzi right away ... You have to take an extra step to activate the input rectangle either by tapping in the input rectangle or hitting the "fill the input rectangle with the current entry" arrow, then erase that content, and then the character you draw on the screen can be selected from the candidate list and will fill into the input rectangle ...
- In the draw hanzi mode, the character-pairing look-ahead feature is great (something I've always missed on the Palm version), but there's a slight drawback when you want to input words with repeated characters, as the list of 候选 (hou xuan, candidate characters to choose from) does not allow the same character to be chosen successively ... For example, to produce "客客气气" ("kekeqiqi"), you have to draw "ke" then "qi," then go back and draw "ke" and insert between "ke" and "qi" then finish up by drawing a second "qi" ... If after drawing the first "ke" you hit the "ellipses" on the extreme right of the screen, you will find more "look ahead" character pairings (35 for "ke"), but I couldn't "客客 keke" on that list ...
- On the Dopod, the entire surface above the text writing area, including the gray area that contains the input rectangle and the menu items at the very top of the screen, appears to be touch sensitive, and this means that if, say, you want to erase the contents of the input field, and you miss hitting the eraser icon, you end up drawing an unwanted character, usually an apostrophe ... This fills the input box and resets the character selection list as the bottom of the page; net is, you have to erase the unwanted character, (you've lost whatever previous input you had in the box) and redraw the characters ... The eraser target is very small and the margin for error is very high -- maybe I need that longer stylus someone mentioned ... And I'm a lefty ...
- I guess you could use the "back" arrow on the extreme left of the ribbon at the bottom of the page in the "draw hanzi" mode, but I counted no fewer than five "back" arrows on the screen (delete, move cursor back, etc.), and it gets a little confusing when you are concentrating on what you want to input ... Erasing is a useful function, but now I'm a little shy of it on the Dopod and find myself hoping I haven't entered the wrong characters ...
- Drawing a line from right to left will erase a character in the input rectangle, but also sometimes draws unwanted characters (彳, 亻, etc). ...
- In general, shifting between the pinyin and "draw hanzi" input modes is more difficult on the Dopod S900 vs. the Palm device, mainly because on the Palm there's no need to switch, since all modes can be present on the same screen ... On the Palm, pinyin and "draw hanzi" co-exist ... On the Dopod, in pinyin mode the space above the keyboard is disabled for drawing, so it's single-mode entry ... To switch to "draw hanzi," you have to tap the pinyin symbol, bring up the list of entry methods, and chose "ma lan hua" ... But after you bring up "ma lan hua" and draw a character on the screen, the software sometimes refuses to place the selected character you've drawn from the "hou xuan" list of candidate characters into the input rectangle, unless you go through the steps described above for activating the field prior to entry ...
... So thanks, renovator ... I've installed the .cab file and can see the GSEN folders in the file manager, but can't quite get the app to rotate anything, but I'm working on it ... Oops, actually it is working now, great ...