Palm OS phones

Jim

榜眼
There are already a few Palm OS mobile phones on the market and more coming. I prefer to keep my menus in English but use Chinese input for Chinese names in my address book, in messages and a few other things. It would be nice if the Chinese input and viewing software of the Oxford Concise EC/CE Dictionary could be used for input and viewing in these situations rather than adding more software to duplicate these functions for every use except the dictionary. Any possibility of this?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
If you like, you can delete the Chinese fonts and/or handwriting recognition software in the dictionary and use an external solution instead; you'll still have to have the extra software installed but at least you'll save some memory space.

We've stayed out of the Chinese OS business ourselves because it's too competitive a market and it takes too much work to constantly be updating a Chinese OS for every new piece of hardware that comes out (or at the very least nervously testing it on them) - within the dictionary, we've got a lot more control, so it's much easier for us to write Chinese display system etc that works reliably on current and future Palm devices. Plus, we generally only like to produce products that we can do better or in a more interesting way than anybody else, and I'm not sure what we would really be adding to Chinese OS'es aside from the integration with the dictionary.

Thanks for the feedback, though.
 

Jim

榜眼
I wasn't really looking for a complete Chinese OS but rather just the ability to read and input Chinese characters into messages, address books, etc. I haven't done any programming in years and none ever for Palm OS so I was being optimistic and hoping it would be possible to leave the Chinese input and recognition from the dictionary on even when not using the dictionary and that the input would go into whatever software was open. I doubt it is that easy but I have found asking never hurts.
 

MichaelK

秀才
I actually was surprised that the included features of my palm (chinese version) pda was actually helpful. The chinese full screen character recognition is very forgiving and has integrated very well into everything I have, including PlecoDict. (It's only downfall is that I'm not a native Chinese speaker/writer so it's time limit of entering your character is unforgiving causing a lot of repeat entries) that's why I like the Pleco recog. But I think if you get new version of an existing recognition program with the plecodict software, it great ... the recog (if you can write Hanzi fast enough enters what you want for pleco. nothing extra needed.) But as I said, I like the pleco recog, because I can take my time (Beta 2 is the reason I'm staying with this, excellent recog.).
 

KingCat

Member
Quick note on the "unforgiving" Chinese OS character entry system: You can adjust the speed that it reads the characters. In the PenPal preferences, adjust the 写书速度 (xie3shu1su4du4) to whatever is comfortable for you. You can also adjust a whole bunch of other stuff, including making the pen write in rainbow colors.
 
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