Palm (and hence Plecodict) on non-Palm / PPC devices

[roddy]

This shows a couple of Nokia devices, the N800 and N810, running Palm OS. There's also an article here about a Linux-based Palm OS which may or may not be the same thing. I'm not sure.

Question: Has anyone played with this yet? And the killer question for folks on here - does Plecodict work? CJKOS? Chinese handwriting input?

I'm quite interested in this, as I'm on the lookout for a new device and something like the N800 looks fantastic - but I have an almost umbilical attachment to Plecodict.

[mikelove]

We have an N800 on order and should have some idea whether or not Pleco will work on it within a week or so. May not work all that well with the beta-version emulator ACCESS just released, though, since they don't seem to have done much about resolution scaling and hence Palm applications only seem appear in a small portion of the screen (at least from the reports I've read) - the screen is pretty big, though, so it should still be fairly readable/usable.

[roddy]

Will look forward to hearing how it works - I've been kind of disappointed that I can't seem to find a device that a) can run Pleco (and maybe a few other Palm apps i've become attached to); B) has a TX (480*320, 3.7 inch) or better standard screen; and has 802.11g Wifi. This might do the trick.

[venture160]

mikelove: Maybe your sales figures will get me wrong here, but yet again I think your customers are begging for a non-windows/palm platform.

[roddy]

I'm not - I'm begging for some better windows / palm hardware. Where's the love for PDA aficionados these days?

Just did a bit of reading, and it seems like Chinese support on the Nokia devices leaves quite a bit to be desired. I'm getting closer and closer to opting to buy a new TX, but I just find it ridiculous there's nothing decent for me to upgrade to and the price of buying the same device again has only dropped about 20% in two years, compared to nearer 50% for my phone.

The alternative is sourcing a new digitizer (mine is half dead), but I can't find anyone selling them in China and I'm not sure I want to attempt to ship something made of glass from the US. And after two years of heavy use, something else could well go wrong with it in the near future. More inclined to get something new and keep the old one as a back up for the next laundry-related PDA disaster.

/grudgingly goes off to look at smartphones.

[mikelove]

venture160 - oh the customers are definitely asking for it, it's not so much a question of if as of when and which - Symbian and iPhone are the leading contenders at the moment so it's mainly a matter of lining up licenses and deciding whether to support S60 and UIQ or only S60 if we do a Symbian version. (the existence of the iPod touch is definitely working in iPhone's favor, since Symbian is very strictly a phone OS and in fact UIQ devices won't even boot without a SIM card installed)

roddy - if you can wait a couple of months, StyleTap for Symbian should be out sometime in Q1 and should be able to give you a very solid emulated-Pleco experience on a UIQ device like the Sony Ericsson P1. Though that would be a phone along with a PDA, so perhaps more hardware than you want. Apparently Nokia's made some big changes in the new OS (Internet Tablet 2008 ) they're about to release for the 800/810 so perhaps Chinese support has improved a bit in that version; they're prominently touting the fact that it now incorporates a Mozilla-based browser so that should help with Chinese-language web pages at least.

[roddy]

Right, good to see Plecodict should be usable on quite a few different devices soonish. If I end up waiting to buy something then the new Ipaq will be top of my list though - 4" VGA screen, 802.11g. No release date though.

[mikelove]

Well, Pleco on the N800 works a little but not very well. It crashes whenever you try to open the handwriting recognizer, though I'm fairly certain this is because of the use of shared libraries, which is something we could easily work around with 10 minutes or so of recompiling. It's also very spotty for loading the large dictionary databases, mainly because they don't seem to have an expansion card simulator yet and the internal memory file loader doesn't handle large files very well (even if you configure it with enough memory). And the screen space is tiny. But the potential is definitely there, at least.

As far as other things to tide you over, though, Palm is selling TXes for $199 US as I believe a Black Friday (day after Thanksgiving, official start of the US Christmas shopping season) sale, so a little less annoying to buy and replace 6 months later than a $299 TX would be.

[adrianlondon]

£207 on the UK site. They're having a laugh.

[roddy]

I think I'm just going to muddle along with my TX for now until my upgrade path gets a little clearer. Mike, you're going to hate me for this but - ETA's on Pleco for other platforms?

[venture160]

I too am waiting.... honestly if there was an S60 version that didn't even have handwriting recognization that would be FINE. I almost NEVER use it, but I guess I am in the minority because I can at least guess how to pinyin out the character %80-%90 of the time.

I am looking at this great phone.. the nokia e51, wifi, small, 3G, sync with exchange... and only if I could use pleco....

[mikelove]

roddy - it's even more difficult than usual to predict those release dates, since we have to get some new licenses negotiated first and the timing for those can vary wildly; sometimes it takes half a year or more and other times we go from initial e-mail to signed agreement in two weeks. But obviously the Olympics would be a big target for this, or even a month or two before so that people working on the wave of Stuff To Bring With You To Beijing articles that would be showing up in travel magazines / newspapers / etc could mention it - there's no way we'd have something for them to actually review by then, but we might be able to persuade them to put in an "iPhone version should be ready by the time you read this" line or something like that at least. Unlikely we'd have a finished product ready by August but maybe at least a usable beta.

venture160 - lots of people share that view, actually, we get tons of e-mails form BlackBerry and E60/61 users. Though the lack of even a QWERTY keyboard on the E51 would make it a little iffy for Pleco, we'd certainly have to design the S60 version to accommodate numeric keypads but if you wanted to look up a complicated word it might get a little frustrating.