Switched from Palm T3 to WindowsMobile 6.0...

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ian

Member
Well, in the last months I've made the switch from Palm to WindowsMobile... enforced by the disintegration of my Palm T3 and the utter failure of the Palm company, or its present owners to capitalize on the superiority of its products.

I was very impressed with Pleco's stance and the help given in switching my licence to WM, but I have been less than impressed with WM 6.0... the screen resolution is nowhere near as good as the Palm was, esp with Chinese characters... the networking facilities seem awful - not at all intuitive and saddled with the legacy of Windows..

I like a lot of aspects of the iPhone / iPod touch, but I do not like the fact that the battery is not user changeable, Apple really need to wake up on this one, neither do I like the fact that they want to choose my mobile phone operator for me - the mobile market outside of the US is far more mature than inside; people have been using their mobiles for 20 odd years in Europe, and are not going to be bludgeoned into Apples ways... When Apples changes its spots and PlecoDict appears on that platform I will not hesitate in throwing my WM machine in the bin... or trying to reformat it with Linux or something.
 
radioman

radioman

状元
Well Im heading to the AXIM X51v - Windows 5... I of course have my hopes way up. My palm also has been a challenge (I am being very polite...).

The Axim screen is VGA... I as well ordered the extended mega battery that will make my unit thicker - but if the battery life goes on for 8 or 10 hours, of moderate use, I don't care. I put the thing on my belt or in my bookbag that is that.

I would move to the Iphone as well. I am a big Apple fan with my Macbook, a number of Ipods, etc. If Pleco has a reasonably robust flashcard system on the platform, I will move over to the Iphone.
 
W

westmeadboy

榜眼
ian - which device did you get?

I don't understand why you blame WM6 for a rubbish screen resolution. WM6 can't do miracles for rubbish hardware...
 
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ldolse

状元
He probably got a QVGA device, which looks to be about half the resolution of the T3. But it's not like Windows Mobile doesn't have choice there, there are plenty of full VGA and even higher options with the latest generation of phones.

I used Palm years ago, and I'll have to admit Windows Mobile seemed pretty awful when I first jumped into it, but after getting used to its quirks I find it to be superior to palm. It's like having a real computer in your pocket. The fact that Unicode works and it has a real filesystem make it tons easier to work with, particularly for chinese study. The biggest pain is that MS doesn't set enough standards about how operators should ship their ROMs, so little things like Chinese fonts and IMEs aren't installed in the English versions. There are plenty of straightforward ways to fix that that are actually supported by the OS, so we're not talking about real hacks, just a bit of work or money to someone who's done that already.

The problem I see with the iPhone is that I imagine a lot of things which exist in the current incarnation of Pleco just won't be options for that form factor. Hardware button navigation? Instant Access? Not options when there is only one button. Writing chinese characters with one's finger isn't much fun after a while either, I've tried it. Odds are Apple will have the copy/paste issue ironed about by the time Pleco gets there, but if not that's going to be a pain too.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
One thing that might improve matters for you a bit screen-resolution wise is if after upgrading to 2.0 you disable text anti-aliasing; that makes everything a bit crisper (at the expense of smoothness) and should therefore make it feel a bit more Palm-like. The modern-ness of Windows Mobile is why we prefer it to Palm now - if Palm had ever actually released Cobalt or another modernized Palm OS we'd have been delighted to support that, but since they didn't we're left with the backwards non-Unicode buggy-file-system antiquated-memory-management but high-resolution and non-intrusive Palm versus the modern but oddly-designed and occasionally-irritating WM.

radioman - flashcards aren't likely to suffer too much on iPhone, I hope - can't make any promises, but virtually all of the tricky flashcard code is cross-platform so with most of the cool features there'll be little reason not to port them over.

ldolse - have you tried writing characters with your finger full-screen? Still not as nice as a stylus (fingertip gets a bit sore after a while) but plenty accurate. There seem to be a few companies making iPhone stylii, actually, though I don't know how well they work (and capacitive touchscreens are much less accurate than the resistive ones used on Palm/WM/etc, even though they do avoid the issue of digitizer drift)
 
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ldolse

状元
Yeah, I played around with the Chinese support on it. It is plenty accurate, you're right - I'm pretty sure it's also Hanwang. It's just the awkwardness of writing with a finger that's annoying.

I haven't seen any of those Stylii, but sounds like a really expensive really tiny thing that could get lost too easy. Not for me, though I imagine a more organized person might do ok with it.
 
H

hairyleprechaun

状元
I have been using an iphone with several free, and paid for, Chinese dictionaries, for a few months now and here is my experience with writing Chinese characters on it.

I haven't found or used a handwriting recognizer for the iphone that allows full screen handwriting yet, however, using the small box to write characters on my iphone with more than, say, 7 or 8 strokes becomes quite cumbersome. This problem becomes more pronounced for me when writing traditional characters which obviously tend to have more strokes. Also, I find that it is hard to precisely position one's finger to meet up with the last stroke when beginning the next stroke in a character (remember we are talking about trying to precisely position a finger that is approximately 1/2 inch or more in diameter on a line that is about 1/16 to 1/8 inch in diameter, as opposed to a stylus that is only a 1/16 inch in diameter at the tip), especially if a person is already used to writing characters quickly.

I sure hope that Pleco's licensed (I am guessing it will still be the awesome Hanwang) full screen handwriting recognizer for iphone will solve some of these issues, because at present I prefer my WM5 PDA and stylus by far for writing characters.

That's my 2 cents worth....
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It is indeed the same Hanwang recognizer, and as in our other software (but unlike with the iPhone built-in recognizer I believe) it supports both simplified and traditional characters at the same time. And can actually support English too, though we're not sure if we'll enable that since it seems like it would generally be slower than using a keyboard. (maybe not with a fast auto-input timer)

From our testing at least it seems to be quite comparable accuracy-wise to a stylus, though dragging your finger against the screen does start to hurt a bit after a few dozen characters so for heavy usage a stylus may still be the best bet.
 
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