Which Smartphone matching my criteria?

[skillphiliac]

Hey,

I'll be pretty short about it. I was asking around chinese-forums.com which smartphone I should buy, and was redirected here. So I'll just paste it...

Yes... well. I have been lurking around the internet for a while now, especially on chinese-forums (obviously), but ultimately figured it was not as easy to get an answer to my - relatively simple - question.

I want a smartphone. I have heard a lot about how smartphones serve as excellent companions on your way to becoming proficient at a language, especially Chinese. I'll be short about it.

What I am looking for:

- smartphone (obviously)
- customisable dictionaries
- best would be touch screen input in order to quickly get a hold of unknown characters
- some sort of electronic flashcards program would be awesome, best with some kind of import function. Learning on the fly would be neat.
- some kind of hard keyboard wouldn't hurt, but I guess is no real requirement.
- cost: certain things about this one. First of all, I don't need to pay a whole lot of money. If I can avoid paying hundreds of buck, I will. Secondly, I currently reside in Germany and will be in Changchun in a couple of weeks. Where to buy?
- I don't care much about other functions, of course, if there are other neat ones, I'll take them.

Well... that's about it for now. Might sound a bit impertinent, but when it comes to rather "big" decisions I am being excruciatingly nitpicky. I am sorry if I requested something there is not, but this would be what I am looking for.

Thank you for helping me out of this one y'all!

I sort of am pretty confident it is going to be an HTC, only because I have heard good things about them. Also, I would be interested in whether I can customize my dictionaries with pleco, as in import for example the cedict?

Thanks a bunch to all of you, I appreciate the ever so tiniest bit of information!

 

[mikelove]

Most of those requirements are pretty easy, but for a hard keyboard your main choices are a slide-out HTC like the Touch Pro/Pro2, the Palm Treo Pro (tricky to find in some areas), or the Samsung Epix. All of which have touchscreens (required for Pleco anyway), but none of which are particularly cheap. You might be able to get a good deal on an older-model / used phone, though - HTC's made a whole bunch of sliding-keyboard models over the years and some of them are pretty inexpensive now. For widely-available new phones, though, if you don't want to spend a lot of money the best bet would probably be a low-end touchscreen-only HTC like the Touch Viva.

Not having been to Changchun in about a decade I'm not sure what the situation is like up there with electronics markets - that's probably a question better left to Chinese-Forums. However, if you're flying through Beijing and aren't immediately turning around and getting on a plane to Changchun, you could always stop off in Zhongguancun and buy a phone there. Otherwise, the safest bet might be to buy something in Germany, though I believe the VAT burden there is a good bit higher than the import / sales tax burden in China.

You can indeed customize dictionaries in Pleco, but custom dictionaries as presently implemented can get a bit unwieldy with large databases; fortunately, however, for CEDICT at least we have our own official conversion of that available as a free Pleco add-on at http://www.pleco.com/dictaddons.html.

 

[skillphiliac]

Wow, great reply, thanks a lot for now.

I have seen offers for the HTC P3450 at around 120 Euros, is there any specific reason I wouldn't want to buy it?

 

[mikelove]

That should be fine (it's the original HTC Touch) - the only real problem with it is the small screen / stylus, but those also make it extremely portable, and the stylus at least can be fixed by buying a larger / more ergonomically-friendly one (see http://www.plecoforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1733&p=12870#p12870 for an insightful tip on that), so as long as you don't have unusually large fingers it should be a fine choice for running Pleco. (and nice and cheap)