tmobile Dash

digires

Member
Does anyone have experience installing Pleco on the tmobile dash (aka HTC Excalibur)? Will it work on this device?

Thanks,

John
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It won't work, unfortunately - at the moment we only support touchscreen-equipped Windows Mobile smartphones, and not keyboard-only devices like the Excalibur.
 

digires

Member
Are you planning on non-touch screen support at some point?

How about the TyTN/Hermes? I suppose it should work on that one?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Yes, it should work fine on the TyTN/Hermes/Trion/8525 model.

We're not sure about non-touchscreen support; coding-wise it would be very easy, we wouldn't really have to change anything about the Pocket PC version except the interface, but the limited memory on those non-touchscreen devices could make installation difficult, and we're worried about customer confusion if we release a product that doesn't have the built-in handwriting recognizer which we're so well known for.
 

digires

Member
The Excalibur has 128MB ROM 64MB SDRAM plus a microSD slot. Should be enough space for pleco dict, right?

I only ask because pleco has become indispensible to me as someone who frequently uses his phone for messaging/email in chinese, and who often looks up characters using pinyin.

Thanks!

PS is there a way to cross-grade from the Palm version to the WM5 version?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Yes, if we released a compatible version that would be enough space. But I get the impression that most other non-touchscreen smartphone devices have a lot less memory, and people seem a lot less inclined to buy add-on memory cards for them since they're mainly being used for e-mail / SMS, so it's still a significant limitation. Of course if we stripped out some of the more advanced index features (like mixed character/Pinyin search) we could make some of our databases a lot smaller...

And yes, there is a crossgrade option; if you log on to the My Orders page on our website you can switch to the Pocket PC version at a 40% discount.
 

digires

Member
It seems as if with the advent of devices like the motorola Q and tmobile dash (excalibur) there is a new subcategory of smartphone and user are emerging. These phones are becoming more prevalent (the dash is selling like hotcakes). I moved from a Palm to get a smaller form factor while retaining powerful messaging functions. I know many people who have done the same. I think there a significant segment of the user base out there that are in the same position (want the smart phone functions, but not willing to commit to the bulkier phones).

I hope you consider supporting these in the future. I really like the excalibur/dash so far, but also really miss my plecodict.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Well in the sense of phones-with-keyboards-but-no-touchscreens, the category has been around for quite a while thanks to BlackBerry - the newer models just happen to be thinner and capable of running a wider range of applications.

We're not completely averse to supporting these sorts of devices, but the lack of a handwriting recognizer really is a big problem. I know some people don't use it much, either because they're far along enough in their Chinese studies that they rarely encounter an unknown character or because they're not learning characters at all yet, but for the vast majority of our customers it's an extremely important feature.
 
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