mikelove said:
it's doubtful they'd go with an American company for that when there are plenty of iPhone developers in Japan.
Having looked at this recently, it seems that a lot of the "proper" Japanese dictionaries (by which I mean excluding the
EDICT Project community effort (and the many free/low cost Japanese dictionaries based on that such as
Kotoba! and
Japanese); and
EIJIRO which is a glossary but not a real dictionary with
comments like "Some care should be taken with this resource, as the English translations can be quite quirky, and at times plain wrong") are already available on the iPhone app store from different developers/publishers, e.g.
J-J:
Koujien (
Logovista) (the Koujien is only available in the Japanese iTunes store but the many other dictionaries etc sold by Logovista are also available elsewhere)
Daijirin (
Monokakido) (this has Japanese handwriting recognition built-in so there's no need to use the iPhone's native Chinese only recognition)
Daijisen (
Shogakukan) (this also has Japanese handwriting recognition)
J-E:
Kenkyusha (the big one, i.e. the so called Green Goddess) (
Logovista) (somewhat expensive...)
E-J:
Kenkyusha (the big one) (
Logovista) (somewhat expensive...)
Wisdom (
Monokakido)
Longman (
Enfour)
Kanji:
Kanjigen (
Logovista)
Beginners:
Oxford (the
MobiSystems version is better as it includes the book's appendices etc whilst the
Paragon version doesn't but does have (useless for natives) English audio)
Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary (
Enfour) (currently not available due to an "internal matter" according to the developer)
I can look up some unknown Japanese Kanji characters by writing them into Daijirin or Daijisen (using their built-in Japanese character recognition) and then copying and pasting it into one of the other dictionaries. It works but it's not terribly fast! (For this process, I came across
Pastebot (a supercharged iPhone clipboard) yesterday which seems it will help.) (Or I can use my Casio electronic dictionary which has a lot more material and has handwriting input etc (although no OCR!) but is much more bulky compared to the iPhone.)
And you can also buy
EPWING versions of some of the above and load them all into an iPhone EPWING reader like
EBPocket or
iDic.
On the subject of OCR, there is an iPhone app which has OCR ability -
wishoTouch - but:
* it's rather expensive for what you get (given that the dictionary data is all from the free EDICT Project) - you have to buy the app and then pay more for the OCR feature
* the OCR is slow (as can be seen in this
video)
* the OCR is unreliable (at least the few times I played around with it - I hope Pleco's will be much better!)
* the OCR doesn't work in real time, i.e. you have to take a photo using the iPhone's camera first
wishoTouch and another EDICT based app,
ShinKanji also support Japanese handwriting recognition but they're both slow and it seems much less reliable compared to Daijirn and Daijisen.
Finally, in this round up of iPhone Japanese dictionaries (or rather, what I've purchased and tried - all of the abovementioned except Koujien, Kodansha and the EPWING versions), there's
JISHOP which is slow and has a horrible interface (IMO) but seems to feel like Wenlin v1 pre-ABC dictionary (i.e. compiling their own dictionary).