pda phone

kuroy

Member
Hi there, I want to know which PDA Phone is good for the Dictionary?
I really need the chinese-english dictionary, and I also want the PDA to be a cellphone. Which phones that you can recommend to me?
I am living in China now.

Thanks
 

Jim

榜眼
Right now in Beijing there is only one phone available, it is the Capitel G99 which is a clone of the Xplore G18 made by Group Sense Ltd. in Hong Kong. There are only a few still available as it is discontinued so you have to hunt for it. If you want to use the Plecodict with all the dictionaries you will need the SD card adapter which is not available here but can be ordered from Hong Kong. It has Palm 4 OS and is a little slow with Plecodict but fine with the Oxford. Not so slow as to not be still very useful. Chinese OS is standard and is very nicely integrated. You can use Grafitti to input Chinese and English at the same time without switching back and forth. I used this phone for more than a year with the SD card adapter and was quite happy. It was stolen just a few days ago and I miss my Plecodict very much. Not sure what my next phone will be as you judge from what I have written below.

Group Sense also makes the Xplore M28 which won't have a mainland clone. It is available in Hong Kong. This phone has Palm 5 OS and an SD card slot right in the phone. This phone was about 3400 RMB in Hong Kong recently. Also includes Chinese OS.

Group Sense also makes the Xplore M68 which has been announced in Europe and is supposed to be available any day now. This phone is also Palm 5 OS and has a 1350 MAh battery which is very nice. Don't know if it will be available in China at a later date or not. This one does not have Chinese OS but should be no problem installing it. You can check out these three phones at Http://www.gspda.com and at http://www.xplore.com.hk/index_en.jsp

Samsung has the SGH-i530 but it has not been released after more than a year and half. It may never be. There were several thousand given away to Olympic officials in Greece and some of these show up on Ebay.

There is also the Qool QDA-700 which you can check out at http://www.qoollabs.com. I am not sure where it is available although it was supposed to be available in some parts or Europe and the Middle East some time ago.

Your only other option is to wait until Plecodict is ported to Pocket PC but that will be September at the earliest.

Hope this helps a little. I found the PDA/phone combo very useful as I hate to carry things and a single unit was nice. It was also easy to use Plecodict instant access to check words in SMSs and it was nice to be able to write Chinese for SMSs instead of using the keypad for entry, good practice.
 

Jim

榜眼
My apologies, you are right. I let my own bias show. I decided sometime ago that I didn't like the size and some other factors of the Treos and didn't even think of them when writing.

The Qool QDA-700 is apparently available in Hong Kong now but I don't know the price yet. It is selling in Germany for about 469 Euros and apparently is also available in the States but if around $680, pretty steep.
 
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