ppc vs palmos

[conrad]

I went shopping today to look at what i could buy here in beijing and was happy to find a great selection. Well i planed on buying a palm as that is what pleco is designed to run on but after reading review at cnet and amazon i have to say i am a little hesitant.

At the current point of devolpment what's the differnce in performance/problems going to be in using a ppc vs a palm product?
how soon will the ppc version of pleco be out. What kind of software hardware issues should i be thinking about and what is penpower?

thanks

 

[mikelove]

Well the PPC version is quite a bit buggier than the Palm one, particularly on devices running the brand new Windows Mobile 5 (on which it barely works at all) - some people can run it with virtually no issues at all, but many other people have had serious problems with it. Of course there are still some people having problems with the Palm version as well, but their ranks seem to be dwindling after the 1.0.2 release.

We're not giving out a firm release date for the finished version (particularly not after all of the reports of bugs with Windows Mobile 5) - "sometime in November" was my last estimate but at this point I'm not even going to stand by that one. It'll be ready when it's ready, basically.

PenPower is a program used to input Chinese characters by writing them on the screen. PlecoDict has its own system for this (which we think is noticeably better than PenPower in some cases), but it only works within PlecoDict, so if you want to use handwriting to enter Chinese characters in other Pocket PC applications then you'll probably want to buy a system that's preloaded with PenPower. (or with HWPen, which uses the same engine that our software does)

 

[afoktay]

I have decided to buy an HP iPAQ RX3115 Pocket PC, in Beijing, for the PlecoDict.

Mike, could you say what the current state of the Beta is?

Conrad, did you get any further in assessing the implications of buying a PPC, and in China? Do you now of the availability and pricing for the above device in Beijing?

Thank you both