I'm using a 2g iPod touch right now for mobile learning. I have no use for a camera or sound recording for study purposes so other than the lack of an EPWING reader it suits my needs very well. I have a denshijisho that I usually carry around when I need more than an EDICT lookup. I just use iAnki for my anki deck, gflash+ for a cram deck, normal iPod functionality for audiobooks, jp music (with lyrics displayed!), and kotoba! for EDICT. I don't study by watching videos, but it has a very high res screen so would work nicely if I wanted to start. There is a bunch of software out there to automate the conversion process as well.

You're not going to find anything that can play all kinds of video formats natively without just going for a laptop (many subnotebooks aren't even powerful enough to play some more advanced or higher quality encodings so forget about handhelds). You should decide which features you really need and which would merely be nice to have.

I actually used to have a PDA and although I loved it, I tried stackz and I found that it is no where near the program that Anki is. I love some aspects of it (the visual feedback with the graphs, the little scratch pad where you can write Kanji in) but I really didnt like the desktop software I have to create decks on and the algorythm compared to Anki and I think thats the most important thing. Is Anki able to be ran on a PDA yet?

To help you understand where I'm coming from I've ordered things from most important to me to least important.


-I need an instant on device that can always be with me.
-EPWing dictionaries searchable by hand written kanji for when I dont know the reading.
-Anki working perfectly with pictures and sound support (pictures and sound are not essential but being able to sync and so in is).
-Price
-Can play video easily without having to convert to proprietary formats.
-Camera would be awesome for taking photos of stuff to SRS.
-Sound recorder for a similar application.

Jarvik7 wrote:

It's very true. While some pdas might handle some common formats, nothing supports all the wild & wacky stuff you will find on the internet. There is no VLC or perian or mplayer for windows mobile etc. (...)  like using obscure stuff like mkv.

Without trying seem like I'm arguing with you; CorePlayer on the PocketPC plays pretty much everything you'd want: http://coreplayer.com/content/view/28/69/

Video:
H.264 (AVC), MKV, MPEG-1, MPEG-4 part 2 (ASP), DivX, XviD, WMV*, Theora*, Dirac*, MJPEG, MSVIDEO1

Audio:
MP3, MP2, AAC, MKA, WMA, Midi*, WAV, OGG, Speex, WAVPACK, TTA, FLAC, MPC, AMR, ADPCM, ALaw, MuLaw, G.729

Jarvik7 wrote:

Even if they did support all the formats, they don't have the horsepower to decode most of the newer codecs at the native resolutions anyways.

That is a reasonable point though. When I play video I do always resize/re-encode it for my PDA, (a 10/20 minute job)  mostly just to reduce the file size though.

did you guys see that tvuplayer has just been released for 3G phones?
http://pages.tvunetworks.com/labs/mobile.html

Hashiriya wrote:

did you guys see that tvuplayer has just been released for 3G phones?
http://pages.tvunetworks.com/labs/mobile.html

Ah, I'm sorry - I wasnt clear here it seems.

What I meant is that I would like to be able to draw a kanji and have it recognized by the IME rather than having to type it in via kana. That way I can search for kanji without knowing the reading.

I can confirm the CorePlayer is excellent and can play pretty much everything you throw at it. The deal breaker with a PDA though is Anki unfortunately.

Does the hack that allows Anki to be used offline on an iPod Touch work for a PDA?

oops i just read the title and posted... i'm so lazy lol

mistamark wrote:

You've got me interested in this. I've been feeling that the reviewing in Stackz seems a little sketchy, and I'd love to be able to add pics and sounds to my cards... Quickly looking into running anki on a PDA, it seems that it's written in Python and apparently there is a python interpreter for the PDA...

Without a doubt the Anki reviews are leagues better. Stacks served me fine (I have a registered copy) until I got about a few thousand cards into it and I had to go searching through my piles finding stuff to review rather than it being served up for me. It was annoying that there was no option that would just bring up all the expired cards. The Super Memo algorythm is much better than the basic Leitner in my opinion. Especially for the volume that we go through.

What is the status of Anki on Phone\iPod Touch:
If you're jailbroken Ankimini works great. If not, iAnki works good enough but still loses the cache sometimes even in beta5.

What options are there for EPWing readers on iPhone\iPod Touch:
If you have a jailbroken one with 1.x firmware then there is iDic, otherwise nothing yet. There is a free offline EDICT reader at least though. There are also some for-pay real (not-EDICT) dictionaries on the appstore.

What are the options for Kanji input on iPhone\iPod Touch:
Normal PC-style IME input, keitei-esque input, and handwriting recognition if you switch to traditional-Chinese input. All the modes have predictive input.

Pros for iPhone/iPod Touch: Small, huge capacitive (pressure based ones suck) touchscreen w/o need for stylus, excellent music & video functions, integrates perfectly with Mac (if you have one), relatively cheap (for the iPod anyways), long battery life. Still manufactured & readily available new worldwide (unlike Zaurus).

Cons: New platform and strict appstore rules so less established software, no jailbreak for 2nd gen. iPod touch yet. No EPWING unless you have a jailbroken 1.x

I don't have a Zaurus or Windows Mobile device so I'll leave those to someone else.

Last edited by Jarvik7 (2008 October 18, 11:21 pm)

OK I think I can answer a bit for the Windows Mobile at least
What is the status of Anki on: Windows Mobile.
I have no idea. Not sure if the iphone hack to allow anki to run offline works. Can anyone asnwer this?

Stackz or SupermemoCE looks to be to the best options. Stackz uses the basic leitner system but is otherwise good, Supermemo uses a far superior algorythm but has an awful user interface

What options are there for EPWing readers on:
Windows Mobile.
http://www.japaneselanguagetools.com/complete.html
This is has all the information on the status of dictionaries on PDAs that youll need. They are pretty much flawless though.

What are the options for Kanji input on
Windows Mobile.
The win moblie ime is excellent. Handwriting recognition, predictive text, etc.

Any other significant disadvantages or advantages for any of the products?
Pros: Windows. Lots of apps. Can play videos, record sound, limitless hardware options.

Cons: Its buggy as all hell and the whole OS is just rubbish really. Its not really being actively developed anymore as everyone is looking to the iPhone and smart phones.

So looking at all three options, the Zaurus looks the best but its difficult to get it working and the hardware is expensive and its a dead format... Hmm no really good optoins though it seems. iPhone is definitely the growth area though.

I went in to Akiba today to price some second hand PDAs and Zaurus's. I thought I'd put them up here for everyone.

Zaurus:
SL-C3200        37800+
SL-C3100        24800+
SL-C3000        16800+
SL-C860        10000+
SL-C760        10800+
SL-C750        10800+
SL-C700        8400+

Windows Mobile (I only looked at models that had at least 640x480 res as I want it for the dictionary):

Dell Axim X50v        26800+
Fujitsu LooX v70 FLXV7    14800+
HP Ipaq hx4700        19999+
Toshiba Genio e830    16800+

These prices are the cheapest I could find for each model.

For running anki and dictionaries only on a Zaurus, does anyone know which model would be the cheapest possible one? On both of the Anki sites you gave me for Zaurus, I wasnt able to find minimum running specs.

OK that's excellent news.

So I think Ill be going for either the SL-C860 or the C1000 if I can find it in the store for a reasonable price. Im halfway through RTK now and if i make it through, ill reward myself with this and let everyone know about my experiences. Still, if anyone else has any comments or ideas on better systems, let me know!

vosmiura wrote:

Jarvik7 wrote:

What is the status of Anki on Phone\iPod Touch:
If you're jailbroken Ankimini works great. If not, iAnki works good enough but still loses the cache sometimes even in beta5.

Try the new version 0.2.1.  It gets around the cache issues in iPhone.

Cool, I just put it on now, we'll see how it goes. I had to manually clear the cache to get the new version loaded on my iPod touch though. Hitting refresh a bunch of times has never worked for me for some reason