I’ve decided it’s time to organize my worklife a little more and, with my goldfish-esque memory, decided a PDA would be a good idea. Here’s the problem: All the PDAs and PDA Phones I’ve seen so far haven’t had an English OS and my Chinese reading abilities are nowhere near up to the task of using a Chinese OS. Is there anywhere that would have a selection of PDAs or PDA Phones with English for the OS? Or am I going to have order one from overseas?
[quote=“rob_the_canuck”]I’ve decided it’s time to organize my worklife a little more and, with my goldfish-esque memory, decided a PDA would be a good idea. Here’s the problem: All the PDAs and PDA Phones I’ve seen so far haven’t had an English OS and my Chinese reading abilities are nowhere near up to the task of using a Chinese OS. Is there anywhere that would have a selection of PDAs or PDA Phones with English for the OS? Or am I going to have order one from overseas?[/quote]I’d say you have three options for buying one here:
[ol][li]Get a Chinese OS Windows Mobile phone and get it reflashed with English OS (or reflash it yourself using instructions from XDA-developers.com if you’re brave). This voids the warranty, although if you did need to send the phone for repair you could try getting the Chinese OS reflashed and hope the repairers wouldn’t realize.
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[li]Buy a second-hand PDA or PDA phone with English OS. Your best bet might be to buy one from another foreigner, although there are also some devices on bid.yahoo.com.tw that look to have English OS’s.
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[li]Buy a Palm. It’s a bit confusing, but basically any Palm OS device has a native English OS. Ones bought here tend to have a third party Chinese input/display tool preinstalled too. The Palm OS is quite dated now, but for PDA-type functions and range of cheap or free applications it’s still unequaled. The confusing bit is that there are also Palm branded devices that run the Windows Mobile OS. I’m not sure whether that’s the Chinese OS or not. Could be worth looking into though.[/li][/ol]Are you in Taipei? If so, I suggest you go to Nova and the K-mall and see what the PDA shops there have on offer.
Thanks for the info joe.
My wife found a couple online that seem to have an English OS and one of the was, indeed, a Palm. From I understand of what you said, a Palm should, in fact, have the option to switch the language from Chinese to English and vice-versa, right?
I’d suggest ordering from www.expansys.com.tw they offer devices with English OS on them, although the price might not be super competitive on all devices.
With regards to flashing the devices, HTC devices are easy, some of the other brands arean’t as easy.
It’s easy to install support for Chinese characters and if you do a search you’ll find a thread about it.
[quote=“rob_the_canuck”]Thanks for the info joe.
My wife found a couple online that seem to have an English OS and one of the was, indeed, a Palm. From I understand of what you said, a Palm should, in fact, have the option to switch the language from Chinese to English and vice-versa, right?[/quote]Sure, provided it’s got the CJKOS software pre-installed. If not, just buy it - it’s about 20 USD if I remember rightly. With that, you can choose just how much Chinese (or Japanese or Korean) you want to appear on your phone.
I’ve been using the Palm OS for the last ten years on 4 different Palm PDAs. The biggest problem with Palm right now is the lack of future support. Palm has not been upgraded in years and the amount of third-party software is dwindling. For my studies in Chinese, Palm is still a viable choice for me because I can use Supermemo and Plecodict on it (although Supermemo display of characters SUCKS. I’m not sure is WM has a better display of large Chinese characters). Palm has been promising an update for its OS for years and nothing has happened. As a platform, it seems like Palm is going to get orphaned and is in its last days.
I’ve played with Palm, WM and IPhone/ITouch. Palm is the most stripped down, easy to use (once you learn the input system). WM has tons of software but is resource hungry. IPhone is just plain slick and aesthetically dazzling. If there was Chinese learning software available for an ITouch, I’d switch immediately. Since you mentioned daily-organization all three platforms offer good 3rd party task-listing programs that are much better than the OEM software supplied with the units.
I’d go out and play with all three platforms. Enter data, move around the menus, etc. See which one is most comfortable for you (do you want a keyboard (virtual or physical) or stylus entry?). Do you need native support of Microsoft Office documents?
There are still advantages to Palm: because the OS is so stripped, power consumption is low and you get incredible battery time (important for studying, maybe not so much for daily use). Very simple (takes awhile to learn the input system though). However, if I were buying again today, I’d go with a WM device for studying Chinese (more software available) and an ITouch if I didn’t need Chinese language study aids.
PS - Joesax knows everything about PDAs and Chinese.