Comparing this software to a stand alone unit (By Besta)....

Hi Follks,
I am married to a Chinese woman and have to have something to translate with when I visit with her in China. I see that this software is pretty nice - but I also have my eyes on a stand aone model made by Besta. Can someone tell me from experience what are the differences, drawbacks, and pluses between this palm software and one of the better units made by Besta? Plus, I really would like to be able to translate a sentence at a time instead of just one word at a time - Does this or any other software do this? I leave for China in 3 days and would surely hope that somebody can advise me on what will be the best solution for my problems.... Thanks so much in advance!!!
Sincerely,
Scott

Which is better.

I think that PlecoDict and a good PDA are better than the Besta solutions.

I own two Besta units, one is the 9440 and the other is the smaller version. I've found that they are a little difficult to use because writing on the upper portion of a clam-shell design is clumsy. Also on the smaller dictionary, it likes to autorecognize after a short time, that can be a pain for unfamiliar characters.

More than that, you should recognize that Besta units are made for Chinese people learning English and not the other way around. As such, there are little quirks in looking up entries in a more limited E-C dictionary and C-E dictionary, and then going to the "Chinese-Chinese" dictionary to find out the pronunciation for the characters.

PlecoDict was designed for people learning Chinese who are native English speakers. The ABC dictionary is also one of the most popular and good dictionaries around.

Hope this helps. I realize that this is mostly opinion, but i hope you can formulate some better questions from this feedback when you look around more.

Have a Besta 95

Hi,
Besta has a lot of data, but it really is set up for the Chinese user, not the 2nd language learner wanting to learn Chinese.

While it has a lot of data, it also has a lot of misinformation. I have worked with it for 11 years and my students have to constantly be told to forget a particular definition as just plain wrong.

If you use it [and maybe any bi-lingual dictionary] it is best to translate back to the original language and try to reconcile the differences that appear.

In recent years, the Besta has gone to cheaper keyboards, no longer has the durible black plastic case, and evolved into trying to provide on-line services and updates. I really think their market has slipped away from them as they have not improved their interface and depend heavily on keyboard input.

The keyboard input restricts them to a bulky clam shell case and makes using a pen on the screen very awkward.

The only real plus with Besta is the Cambridge Encyclopedia in Chinese that offers you some real honest reading challenges.

Many of the additional functiosn [like the calculator and phone book] are so awkward that I just don't care to use them. This implies that Chinese programers just don't have any knowledge of user friendly ergonomic interfaces. Palm is a real leader in this area.

Is PlecoDict to mimic the Besta model by offering periodic, downloadable database updates? Or is that what 1.0 to 1.0.1 is...?

We don't offer frequent database updates because, unlike Besta, we licensed our databases from print publishers and they don't update their data sets very often. We did just recently upgrade everyone from the 2nd to the 3rd edition of the Oxford E&C dictionary (in conjunction with the release of PlecoDict), and we'll do the same with other Oxford and ABC dictionary updates in the future, but it's unlikely we'll do frequent updates like Besta simply because we don't have any data to update.

The one exception to this is the free databases, particularly the CEDICT and ADSO ones - we've held off on releasing updates to those so far because we haven't yet added a facility to re-link flashcards from one version of a database to another, but once we do that (probably in PlecoDict 1.1) we plan to release regular ADSO/CEDICT database updates.