Edict has its purposes--funny the amount of vitriol a dictionary brings out! Either it's for you or it's not. But I second the recommendation of EBPocket and EPWING dictionaries. There are English instructions at
http://www.japaneselanguagetools.com/iPh...ml#install for how to install EPWING dictionaries to EBPocket on your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad (free dictionaries at the same site, too, including an improved version of the dreaded, baby-killing Edict, plus a version of Kanjidic with stroke-order diagrams for 6355 JIS X0208 kanji).
All the major players are available in EPWING or can be converted to it easily (Koujien in EPWING format will run 8000 yen or more, Daijirin will run 6000 yen or more and needs to be converted to EPWING [though it's not hard], and the set of both Kenkyusha Daijiten [E>J and J<E] in EPWING generally runs about 25,000 yen). Like anything else they're worth it if they're what you need.
There's also Eijiro, which is made by and for professional translators--it's got everything in Kenkyusha and a lot more, especially technical terms from many disciplines and casual Japanese you don't find in regular dictionaries. You can try Eijiro for free online to see the breadth and depth of the entries, though the online version lacks the features you'd get running it in EB Pocket (
http://www.alc.co.jp/). As Eijiro is made for pros, for the simplest words it assumes you know the basic meaning and just gives you more colorful ways of saying them (for straightforward things like "dog" you can turn to Edict); for the other 99% it gives full definitions with example sentences comparable to Kenkyusha and other dictionaries. However, it also has a huge stock of separate sentences and phrases, and the sophisticated Cross Search feature in EBPocket lets you find the one that says just what you need, either to use as a phrasebook or to illustrate how a particular word is used in a particular context--it's the best way to see, e.g., where a word fits within the word order of a sentence, what particle it takes, etc. High-level Japanese speakers can download the original in EPWING format from the Eijiro site for 5000 yen; for the same price people who need more help can download a version from my site,
http://www.japaneselanguagetools.com/docs/Eijiro.html, that has hiragana added after almost every kanji-containing word, making it much easier to read and use (it also allows you to look up a word by either how it's written with kanji or how it's pronounced in hiragana--the original and all other Eijiro apps require that Japanese words be entered in kanji if they're normally written that way). The JLT version of Eijiro comes as a set with a dictionary that helps you conjugate verbs or find the tense and dictionary form of a conjugated verb--see
http://www.japaneselanguagetools.com/doc...tions.html for info and screenshots of that.
