Your Palm Computer Knows Spanish
Dateline: 04/24/00Want to have Spanish-language reference materials with you wherever you go but don't want to lug a book around? Nowadays, the answer is no farther away than a palmtop computer.
Related Sites:Bulletin Board — If you've used in Spanish software for the Palm, share your experiences.Palmtops/PDAs — News and advice about all sorts of palmtop computers and electronic organizers. Software Archive — Directory of places to download Palm OS software. 3Com Iberia — The Palm manufacturer's site in Spanish. Enter — Online Colombian publication with the latest Spanish-language news about computers and the Internet. |
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The ubiquitous devices, popular for several years among business executives and computer geeks, are entering the mainstream. The devices — comparable in memory and computing power to PCs of a decade ago but much tinier — can be purchased for as little as $150. And with a new battle between Palm and Microsoft Pocket Windows operating systems under way, expect prices to continue going down while features improve.
The Palm system is easily the market leader, and the good news for people who use Spanish is that the operating system was designed from the beginning to accommodate the character sets of European languages. There's no need for special configurations as with Windows, and the accents, tildes, umlauts and punctuation of Spanish are written in an easy-to-remember way using the built-in Graffiti handwriting-recognition software.
If you're looking for a comprehensive Spanish-English dictionary for the Palm OS, look no further than the Collins dictionary. With 110,000 translations and 80,000 references as well as verb conjugations, it has just about everything you'd find in a printed dictionary. Once you "open" the dictionary, you are presented with an unadorned list of words. Write in the first letters of the word you want to translate, and the the word selection shifts to words beginning with those letters. Double-tap on the word you want, and a full definition appears. Other features included a word of the day and verb conjugations.
The cost for this dictionary is a reasonable $39. (All prices listed are in U.S. dollars and, while correct at the time of writing, are subject to change.) If you want to make certain this dictionary is what you want, you can download a demo from Palmtop Software and various other Palm software sites. (It includes all the listings starting with "A" as well as a few other words.) The full program will take up about 1.25 MB of your Palm's memory, so it's probably best used with units that have 4 megabyes or more or memory.
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