Difference professional bundle/basic bundle

MPenguin

秀才
I noticed on the store webpage that the Professional and basic both have:

Fullscreen Handwriting Recognizer
Optical Character Recognizer
Document Reader (not fully implemented in the current Android version)
Flashcards (not available in the current Android version)
Male + Female Audio Pronunciation
Stroke Order Diagrams

The professional bundle has:
ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary (wonderful, 200,000 entries)
ABC English-Chinese Dictionary (smaller but a good E-C counterpart)
21st Century English-Chinese Dictionary (much larger but no Pinyin)

While the basic has:
The NWP English-Chinese Pinyin dictionary (a good English-Chinese counterpart to the free PLC and CC-CEDICT Chinese-English dictionaries).

Why does the professional not have the NWP?

Also, I'm running Beta 2 right now. If I purchase the professional bundle and upgrade, will I lose the PLC dictionary that I have? (I guess it's probably not that good compared to the others anyway.)
 

Sarevok

进士
MPenguin said:
If I purchase the professional bundle and upgrade, will I lose the PLC dictionary that I have? (I guess it's probably not that good compared to the others anyway.)

PLC dictionary is in all versions, even in the demo. And I don't think it deserves such criticism - it's actually this dictionary going by a different name now. While it cannot compete with ABC's number of entries (though nearly 80000 is no small number either), its detailed definitions with a wealth of example sentences more than make up for that. I actually bought it separately last year while I was still running a Windows Mobile version (which was generally much less generous with its bundles and add-ons pricing) and I am glad I did. I still use ABC as my default dictionary of choice, but I always switch to this one (or Guifan) when I need a more detailed explanations. ABC is better for quick translations, but PLC is better for learning and creating flashcards (although some definitions are too long to be suitable for that). And if I remember correctly, in some topic Mike wrote that they now own this dictionary and they can modify or expand it - which means it will just get better and better...
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
MPenguin said:
Why does the professional not have the NWP?

The NWP and ABC English-Chinese are pretty similar in scope, so we didn't really see the need to include both. NWP is a bit bigger than ABC E-C so we include it in the Basic, but ABC E-C pairs better with ABC C-E so we include that in the Professional.

MPenguin said:
Also, I'm running Beta 2 right now. If I purchase the professional bundle and upgrade, will I lose the PLC dictionary that I have? (I guess it's probably not that good compared to the others anyway.)

No, you still get access to it too. And we think it actually is quite good :)

Sarevok said:
PLC dictionary is in all versions, even in the demo. And I don't think it deserves such criticism - it's actually this dictionary going by a different name now. While it cannot compete with ABC's number of entries (though nearly 80000 is no small number either), its detailed definitions with a wealth of example sentences more than make up for that. I actually bought it separately last year while I was still running a Windows Mobile version (which was generally much less generous with its bundles and add-ons pricing) and I am glad I did. I still use ABC as my default dictionary of choice, but I always switch to this one (or Guifan) when I need a more detailed explanations. ABC is better for quick translations, but PLC is better for learning and creating flashcards (although some definitions are too long to be suitable for that). And if I remember correctly, in some topic Mike wrote that they now own this dictionary and they can modify or expand it - which means it will just get better and better...

Thanks!

We don't own the copyright for the original dictionary outright, but we now have a license that's good forever and lets us edit it however we want and distribute it however we want (including giving it away for free). And we're very slowly improving it, adding new entries, revising old ones, replacing outdated example sentences with more current ones, updating definitions, adding parts of speech...

Long-term we're hoping to turn it into a major competitive differentiator; ABC's a great dictionary, but they've been way too liberal about licensing it out to other companies, so now it's almost more of a "checkbox feature," something everybody has and hence nobody can use as an argument for buying their product over somebody else's. But pairing ABC with another, complementary dictionary that's exclusively ours (the original dictionary isn't - there are at least two other apps using it [though neither of them is free] - but the enhancements we make to it are our own) gives us something nobody else can quite duplicate.

And yes, our iOS/Android offerings are indeed more generous - we've made a lot of progress the last few years at renegotiating licenses to allow for lower pricing.
 
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