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From: "John R. Yamamoto-Wilson" <john@rarebooksinjapan.com>
Newsgroups: fj.life.in-japan
Subject: Zaurus? Canon Wordtank? Or...?
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 06:45:54 +0900
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As I said in another thread, my trusty Zaurus is about ten years old 
now, and giving signs of being at the end of its tether. I'm looking for 
a replacement, and wondered what advice people might have.

Basically, I only use the Zaurus as a dictionary, so its PDA features 
are superfluous to my needs. As a dictionary, its main advantage over 
other electronic dictionaries is the handwriting recognition of kanji, 
coupled with easy cross-referencing of meanings, readings and combinations.

The only Zaurus models I've been able to find in the shops so far are 
the latest SL range, even the cheapest of which has dozens of PDA 
features that are unnecessary to my requirements and bump the price up 
to much more than I paid for my current model.

However, I did notice that there is one electronic dictionary, the Canon 
Wordtank, which appears to have many of the Kanji handwriting 
recognition features which characterise the Zaurus.

At first sight, this looks like a cheaper and better alternative to the 
Zaurus PDA, for my purposes. It'd take me some time to get used to the 
very different interface, but my initial impression is that, as a 
dictionary, it does everything my old Zaurus does and more (demonstrates 
stroke order for writing kanji, gives Chinese kanji where these are 
different from the Japanese ones - handy for working with older Japanese 
texts, especially those written in Sino-Japanese). It can even be set to 
an English-language interface.

Can anyone speak from experience here? I'd be especially interested to 
hear from anyone who uses the Canon Wordtank or has any other 
recommendations for handwritten kanji recognition devices.

John
http:/rarebooksinjapan.com