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The whole system is superlative.

Submitted by R. Blau on 05/Apr/2010

Message:

This system has been a wonderful solution for me and a real lifesaver when I first got it, as I was living and working in an area of Japan without any English speakers in the region and my Japanese was intermediate at best. This thing never left my pocket and I truly don't know what I would have done without it. The case protected it while I was working on a farm and operating machinery!

The dictionaries are excellent - I was constantly surprising my Japanese friends with what terms I was able to look up, including a lot of slang. The best part by far is direct entry lookup.

The PDA itself is so-so. I find it can be slow, the interface is awkward, the hard reset if you let the battery discharge fully is very annoying. But overall, if you are using it primarily as a dictionary all my complaints are very minor and I have been able to expand its capabilities with a folding keyboard and use it for web browsing and notetaking.

More than anything else, though, what makes this work is Peter himself. I've never seen anything like the level of help he provides his customers. He helped with my awkward delivery situation and numerous times after when I had general questions or technical problems. He wrote novel-length emails explaining the answer to any question I could think of and just now I received an email from him about updates to the software. I've barely touched the thing in 2 years! (Because I haven't had the chance to use Japanese much)

I would recommend this system over anything else on the market because it's priced similar to a single-purpose electronic dictionary but has far more capabilities - the dictionaries are expandable and have more words to begin with, and you can use it for much more than the dictionary.

Note from Peter: This customer is discussing the Complete System on an Axim X50V PDA with Japanese WM2003SE operating system. It can slow down when the internal memory gets too full--keeping as much as possible on the memory card instead of the internal memory prevents that, as I advised doing when sending out these systems. In the newer X51V Axims, the memory structure is different and this isn't a factor. Also, the X51V doesn't reset when the battery dies, and the interface, especially for installing new software, has been improved--and of course the OS is in English, making it that much easier for English speakers. OS language doesn't matter much for dictionary use, as then you'd be using only the English-language dictionary program interface, but for exploring the full capability of the device of course it helps if the OS is in one's native language.

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