Zaurus? Canon Wordtank? Or...?

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 superfluous 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. It can even be set
to an English-language interface.

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).

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

--
__________________________________

John R. Yamamoto-Wilson
http://pweb.sophia.ac.jp/~j-yamamo/



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