List of smartphones for running Pleco

[zj]

I just recently went through a long search for a new cell phone that could run Pleco. I wanted a smartphone so that I wouldn't have to carry both a PDA and phone around all the time, and I wanted one with a keyboard so that I wouldn't have to write English and Chinese with a stylus or a painfully slow onscreeen keyboard.
I found it pretty difficult to find a suitable phone while in China. Many had a suitable OS but no keyboard, many had suitable OS and keyboard but no touchscreen. Eventually I bought a Treo 650 in Shanghai for 1,400RMB just last month(They also had a Dopod 838 for 1,700).

For those of you who are in the market for a new device for running Pleco, I hope to make your search a little easier by listing some of the models I came across that seemed suitable:

Asus P525

Dopod/HTC http://www.dopod.com
A lot of Windows mobile smartphones, but only a few with keyboard and touchscreen
Dopod 838 and C858

Treo 650, 680, 700p, etc

My opinion of the Treo 650 is that it's a good PDA and a so-so phone. It's internal memory is pretty weak, but not a big problem if you just buy an SD card

If anyone wants to add any models to this list, please share

 

[thph2006]

I'm strongly considering this one:
HTC TyTN II http://www.htc.com/product/03-product_tytn_II.htm
It looks like a good phone to me although a bit expensive. Has quad-band phone/pen and keyboard input/2 cameras/video/mp3/GPS/MS Office, etc. As a cautionary note though, it's Windows Mobile 6 so you'd need to run beta Plecodict for the time being.

If anyone knows of another phone with quad-band and similar capabilities but bigger screen please let me know. I use reading glasses but don't have to if the on-screen font is large enough.

Also, does anyone know if there are China maps available for this phone? I'd love to be able to use it as a GPS street guide on trips to China.

Thanks, Tom

 

[mikelove]

I'm probably starting to sound like a broken record, but you really shouldn't buy a phone expecting to use the 2.0 Beta as your everyday dictionary on it; for a lot of people it just won't be stable enough, or there will be too many features that don't work correctly. So basically if you buy a WM6 phone now you should either be prepared to put up with the PlecoDict 1.0 crashing problems or be OK with the fact that you might not have a solid, working version of Pleco on it for a few months.

 

[hairyleprechaun]

Hello Mike,

Considering the predicament for people who want a smartphone that will run Plecodict, but want more features or a bigger screen than what is available on the Treos, what would you suggest to people for a good smartphone to run Pleco? Or as you keep saying, should we just wait until Pleco 2.0 is out of beta state? And, if that is the case, are you looking at revising/updating the hardware discussion page, to include more recent models, and how compatible/stable they tend to be when running Pleco 2.0 (post beta of course)?

Personally I have been looking at the iPhone, HTC Touch, HTC TyTNII, Nokia N95, Nokia N81. Of course I am aware that there is not yet (or may never be, depending on how customer conscious Apple decides to be with allowing third party applications) a port to the iPhone or to Symbian.

Darrol

 

[gato]

The only smartphones with screens larger than the Treo that can run PlecoDict are the Windows Mobile phones, but I hear that Windows Mobile phones are even more unstable than PalmOS phones. It's a pity because Microsoft had a lot of time to overrun Palm while Palm was stumbling around, but now both are playing catchup to the Apple iPhone. Neither seems capable of writing good software, given their recent track records (Windows Vista reportedly is horrible). If you really want to go there, then maybe go for Windows Mobile 6.0 rather than 5.0 because 5.0 is supposedly very buggy.

 

[hairyleprechaun]

Thanks for the info Gato.

Yeah, I have been using an HP iPAQ hx2495. While I love the features of it, I can't stand how buggy Windows Mobile 5.0 is, and how often I have to reset the device because it freezes up. Additionally, I would like to combine my phone and PDA/media player into one unit that has a large, highquality screen, but is still light and compact like the Apple iPHONE. However, with all of the instability issues I have had with my pocket pc up to this point, I just can't imagine trying to add phone hardware and software to a Windows based device. It gives me a headache just to think about it.

Anyway, hopefully Windows Mobile 6.0 has, as everyone is saying, improved greatly on the stability issues of 5.0, because small improvements just wouldn't be enough, especially if one considers how slowly updates come out for the Windows Mobile OS, though that too is supposed to change with 6.0.