An excellent product, product review

[mandel1luke]

Please note that I am not affiliated with the company whose product I am reviewing. I'm doing so because I found the product to be excellent.

A month ago I bought the Bider Chinese Plus Professional Package(http://www.biderworld.com/index.asp). I had walked around the computer shop and a showcase salesman demonstrated how the pen tablet worked. In short, I tried the pen and tablet and found it to be very good.

To date I haven't tried the pen tablet (have been using the computer input for the product) but thought the package so helpful I couldn't resist reviewing it here.

In short this is what you get in the Professional Package:

*Fonts - 30-odd Chinese fonts, mostly Founders

*Muti-input Method - ability to input Chinese using Changjie, Phonetic, Pinyin, Five Strokes, Canton (?, haven't tried it), Unicode, Zheng Ma etc

*Chinese Stroke - stroke sequence is shown in animation. with pronounciation, very useful for learners.

*Trans Star ITE - Translates a document either in Chinese or into English. The quality is a bit like what you get using Google Translate.

*PinYin Phonetic - Auto adding of pinyin from characters using a function

*TH OCR Professional - Tsing Hua patented Chinese OCR, for reading of documents

*Voice mate - reads aloud any passage, in a male or female voice.

*Character maker - Cannot find a character? Not in Unicode? You can create one yourself (!)

*Handwriting - Allegedly recognizes handwriting progressively better using a smart system (haven't tried it)

*Pen and tablet - a computerized pen and tablet. Write a character and your character comes out via recognition. Useful for people preferring writing to input. I was told by the salesperson the professional version has a better tablet that could easily last for four to five years with use.

*The Jinshan Ciba 金山词霸 / Kingsoft Powerword - This is a standalone product software packaged into the Professional Pack. The Kingsoft Powerword is the most popular English-Chinese, Chinese-English software in China. Tried it. Has an excellent monolingual dictionary too, but wonder where it is from. Excellent for learners and translators. Caveat is the excessive typos in the software.

Like I say, I found the package excellent value. It is US$200 but I thought if you are a professional translator or trying to learn the language, wouldn't mind inputing using pen writing and in the intermediate to advanced stage, this may be for you. There're cheaper versions too (Academic, Standard) but with fewer functions.

There's a Chinese Plus Academic 30-day tryout so maybe some interested people may want to try it out.

Just a review.