I bought the i-mate JAMA from expansys (took 4 days to arrive) and thought it might be useful to give some feedback because this is probably the cheapest first-hand solution for buying a new device to run Pleco (???).
For me, the most important things were: small/light, plays mp3, runs plecodict and is a phone! I was also hoping to be able to record sound (dialogues in classes etc). Radio would have been nice but is not supported by the JAMA.
The smartphone itself is small and light by windows mobile standards (and not that bad by normal mobile phone standards). Its also less wide than PDAs and so fits much nicer in the hand.
However, this means that the screen is just 2.4" and so (with a resolution of 240x320) I find it a little straining on the eyes when using for more than 30 mins intensively. Might be just me though. (Aside - I much prefer using Pleco in landscape mode...)
The screen is otherwise great, very clear and bright.
I havent used the smartphone much as a phone so I cant comment much on that side of things. The sound quality seems just about passable, certainly not great.
I'm very disappointed by the microphone since its poor quality makes it almost useless for recording lengthy voice memos (dialogues in classes). If I just want to say a short phrase I can just speak right into the microphone and its just about ok, but leaving the phone on the table to record gives very disappointing results (weak and unclear).
I've tried a bunch of mp3 player apps many of which are almost great but suffer from the random crash. Pocket Player is such an app but the occasional crash means I dont use that any more. Instead S2P seems like the best one and has an Ipod-Touch look and feel.
Last but not least, Pleco runs very well (1.0.3b that is, I havent tried the 2.0 beta). I can make it crash by using the up/down hardware buttons to scroll the main definition. Just press the "up" key when already at the top, or the "down" key when already at the bottom and a load of random characters will fill the definition pane. But this is not a problem since I dont typically use those buttons. Other than that I've just had one crash which was probably more to do with the music player I was running at the same time.
Generally the Windows Mobile 5.0 OS runs fine but I just needed to try out lots of apps to find out which ones dont crash! It is consistent at least
Ok, I've generally mentioned a bunch of problems, but for the money (1000RMB including postage and packing to anywhere in China) I think this is an excellent deal for anyone wanting to get a device to run Pleco on the cheap. However, I had to spend quite a bit of time fiddling around with things at the beginning (like special ways to format the microSD card so it would be recognised by the JAMA) so maybe a non-technical person might not want this sort of bother...
