I figured I'd post a brief review of this electronic dictionary, since I picked one up in October while I was in Japan, and I really felt like sharing how much I like it. I bought it at the Bic Camera in Nagoya for about 29,800 yen (~$260 US at the time), but I think you can probably find it for less now. (When I left Japan in mid-November, I saw it at Bic for ~26,000 yen.)
http://www.sharp.co.jp/products/pc_mobil...index.html
It comes in other colors, but I went with black.
The Sharp is one of the new models of Japanese electronic dictionaries that come with a small touchpad at the base of the unit that allows you to draw the kanji you want to look up, just like the electronic dictionary you can buy for the Nintendo DS. (Kanji sonomama rakubiki jiten, I think it's called...) Sharp isn't the only company doing this-- I think I saw a line of e-dictionaries by Casio as well that had touchpad kanji entry.
Why did I want to replace my DS that with this? Well, in my case, I wanted something that booted up faster for quicker lookups, that also had a bigger screen. The screen on the DS is murder on my eyes for trying to read kanji. Also, the DS is painfully slow to boot up in comparison, just to look up a word or two. The Sharp also has a better selection of other dictionaries to use when looking up tricky words.
Once I started looking up kanji by drawing them, I was hooked on that particular process. I have an older Sharp edict, and while I like it a lot, looking up kanji by stroke counts and radicals is never as easy or straightforward as it sounds. The nice thing about the kanji recognition is that it will guess your character, then show 10 or so possible matches it thinks you're trying to make along the top of the touchpad, while filling in the blank up top with guess #1. So you can tell it what you meant, not necessarily what you drew. I'd say it's about 70% accurate at guessing, so long as you get the stroke order right, you'll be in the ballpark.
Yes, it boots up almost instantaneously. (Maybe a 1-2 second pause.) There are dedicated buttons on the top row that will turn it on instantly at the specified dictionary's lookup page, although I wind up using the Eng/JP JP/Eng lookup page almost exclusively. (Although sometimes I'm forced to use the JP/JP dict.) The Eng/JP dictionary is Genius 2, the same one they've used for the last 4 years or so, and it's the same one in Kanji sonomama rakubiki jiten, but there are other dictionaries in it you can use. There's a kanji dictionary, a few japanese dictionaries, and others as well. With its Super-jump feature, you can look up a word in a number of dictionaries by selecting it in the text you see on-screen. Very handy.
There is an SD card slot for adding other dictionaries, but I have no idea how it works. It would be nice to be able to add a better dictionary, but that will have to come later.
If you go to the main menu, you will see an insane number of dictionaries built in to the unit, most of which you will never use. It also has a speaker for pronunciation of English words. I couldn't find any Japanese entries that used it, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. There are some recorded voices for English, others use a TTS program.
If you're familiar with previous Sharp models, then you won't have much trouble with this one. The keyboard layout is a little different, but the menu layout is roughly the same... except... they removed one feature I loved in my old Sharp, and that was the ability to look up kanji compounds by any character in the compound. Now you can only do it by the first character in the compound, or so it seems. I suppose I need to spend some more time with it to see if I can find a separate dictionary for looking up compounds.
Size-wise, it's a little big. It's a lot slimmer than the DS, but it's wider. It's about the size of a skinny paperback. It's pocketable, but only just. It runs on 2 AAA batteries. It also comes with headphones (don't bother), and a stylus. The stylus isn't great, but it does its job.
Getting one if you don't live in or travel to Japan might be tricky. You'll probably need to find an importer, or contact a friend over there. Just remind them that they'll get points if they buy it at one of the big chain stores, so they'll get a little something, too. (I got about 3000 yen worth of points when I bought mine, enough for a really ugly bright orange shockproof case.)
EDIT: Ah, one other very important thing-- everything is in Japanese. I don't think there's a function to turn menus to English, and anyway, the manual and everything else is in Japanese. So this would NOT be something for beginners.
http://www.sharp.co.jp/products/pc_mobil...index.html
It comes in other colors, but I went with black.
The Sharp is one of the new models of Japanese electronic dictionaries that come with a small touchpad at the base of the unit that allows you to draw the kanji you want to look up, just like the electronic dictionary you can buy for the Nintendo DS. (Kanji sonomama rakubiki jiten, I think it's called...) Sharp isn't the only company doing this-- I think I saw a line of e-dictionaries by Casio as well that had touchpad kanji entry.
Why did I want to replace my DS that with this? Well, in my case, I wanted something that booted up faster for quicker lookups, that also had a bigger screen. The screen on the DS is murder on my eyes for trying to read kanji. Also, the DS is painfully slow to boot up in comparison, just to look up a word or two. The Sharp also has a better selection of other dictionaries to use when looking up tricky words.
Once I started looking up kanji by drawing them, I was hooked on that particular process. I have an older Sharp edict, and while I like it a lot, looking up kanji by stroke counts and radicals is never as easy or straightforward as it sounds. The nice thing about the kanji recognition is that it will guess your character, then show 10 or so possible matches it thinks you're trying to make along the top of the touchpad, while filling in the blank up top with guess #1. So you can tell it what you meant, not necessarily what you drew. I'd say it's about 70% accurate at guessing, so long as you get the stroke order right, you'll be in the ballpark.
Yes, it boots up almost instantaneously. (Maybe a 1-2 second pause.) There are dedicated buttons on the top row that will turn it on instantly at the specified dictionary's lookup page, although I wind up using the Eng/JP JP/Eng lookup page almost exclusively. (Although sometimes I'm forced to use the JP/JP dict.) The Eng/JP dictionary is Genius 2, the same one they've used for the last 4 years or so, and it's the same one in Kanji sonomama rakubiki jiten, but there are other dictionaries in it you can use. There's a kanji dictionary, a few japanese dictionaries, and others as well. With its Super-jump feature, you can look up a word in a number of dictionaries by selecting it in the text you see on-screen. Very handy.
There is an SD card slot for adding other dictionaries, but I have no idea how it works. It would be nice to be able to add a better dictionary, but that will have to come later.
If you go to the main menu, you will see an insane number of dictionaries built in to the unit, most of which you will never use. It also has a speaker for pronunciation of English words. I couldn't find any Japanese entries that used it, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. There are some recorded voices for English, others use a TTS program.
If you're familiar with previous Sharp models, then you won't have much trouble with this one. The keyboard layout is a little different, but the menu layout is roughly the same... except... they removed one feature I loved in my old Sharp, and that was the ability to look up kanji compounds by any character in the compound. Now you can only do it by the first character in the compound, or so it seems. I suppose I need to spend some more time with it to see if I can find a separate dictionary for looking up compounds.
Size-wise, it's a little big. It's a lot slimmer than the DS, but it's wider. It's about the size of a skinny paperback. It's pocketable, but only just. It runs on 2 AAA batteries. It also comes with headphones (don't bother), and a stylus. The stylus isn't great, but it does its job.
Getting one if you don't live in or travel to Japan might be tricky. You'll probably need to find an importer, or contact a friend over there. Just remind them that they'll get points if they buy it at one of the big chain stores, so they'll get a little something, too. (I got about 3000 yen worth of points when I bought mine, enough for a really ugly bright orange shockproof case.)
EDIT: Ah, one other very important thing-- everything is in Japanese. I don't think there's a function to turn menus to English, and anyway, the manual and everything else is in Japanese. So this would NOT be something for beginners.
Edited: 2008-01-07, 1:55 pm
