I've just purchased a Nokia N800 from Amazon which should arrive by the end of the week. I'm heavily tech-savvy and plan on installing OS2008 and Garnet VM Beta as soon as its in my hot hands.
I'm moving to Taiwan (at the end of January) to teach English for a number of years and (hopefully) become fluent in Mandarin - not without a little help from the technological gods of course. Thus, I embarked on my journey today looking for a usable English->Chinese->English Dictionary. My first stop was portable dict's like the BBK and Ectaco models which quickly jumped to researching the Palm TX functionality with Pleco (for the obvious benefits of Character input, pinyin support, etc). I delved into PDA forums for a few hours and came out with a hand-full of uncertainty about reliability, upgradeability, longevity, open-source functionality, and the like. Palm OS and iPaq models were reviewed as either being great at first, with poor longevity (Palm) or high-pricing and poor OS support (iPaq). Then I checked out the Nokia Nseries.
Obviously, Nokia is known for superior quality in manufacturing, open-source support, longevity, etc. My friend, who is head-IT at a local University, has had the same Nokia Phone for 6 or 7 years (one of the cutting-edge pioneers in Smartphoning: the 3650) which he has proceeded to mod out to the max via open-source software over the years. Point being, Nokia is by far and away the poster child for those who have some to a lot of technical proficiency and a little ingenuity to mold their electronics to suit their interests.
So after reviewing Palms, iPaqs and the like - the Nokia N800 with its $230.00 price tag (Amazon), recent release of stable OS2008, and Garnet VM Beta (ACCESS), and slick extras like Bluetooth Keyboard/GPS add-ons - was the ideal piece of equipment with everything I wanted at a bargain-bin price AND Nokia's exceptional craftsmanship - despite the few reviewed drawbacks like a so-so screen (in terms of pressure-sensitivity) and some wonky buttons - what more could you want? For that price and expandability, a small price to pay I say.
Only other drawback - the one thing I began my quest in search for, a PDA or other Electronic unit that acted as a sweet E->Ch Dict., was somewhat...untested on the Nokia Nseries (as far as Pleco goes anyway) - save for the few posts on this forum topic where Mikelove has vouched for its potential, but currently unstable performance on the N800.
SO, the point of all of THAT backstory is that I will have this lil' gizmo-wondertoy fully-loaded and ready to rock out by the end of the week whereupon I will get GarnetVM in full effect and FINALLY: testing PlecoDict. on the N800 via Garnet VM. I've seen all the test-footage of GarnetVM and seeing as how its JUST been released and has plenty of (relative) time to mature, I'm guessing they will be able to fix issues like the resolution (e.g. "Tiny emulated Palm screen"). I saw them change the orientation of the Garnet VM App. window on the Nokia Screen, but they DEFINITELY need to add-in some expandable window functionality - then methinks, we'd really have something, no?
I will nab the Trial versions of both Basic and Complete PlecoDict.'s for trial on the new toy and let everyone know how it pans out. I've got my fingers crossed for sure as GarnetVM claims to have App. support of like 30,000+ progs, but if Pleco doesn't happen to be one of them, then I guess I'm just left with a sweet portable that has mp3, PDA, voIP, GPS, VidCam, Web-browsing, and Skype-ready capabilities...oh well :roll: happy Surfing!
