You know, I’m fond of reading books. My true obsession is books by English and American science-fiction writers. William Gibson, Philip Dick, Arthur C Clarke just to name some of the favorites. I read all of them in original and, being non-native language speaker, face some problems with new words, idioms and phrases. I have several huge dictionaries bi- and mono-lingual as well as five desktop dictionaries on my laptop (Cambridge Advanced, Oxford Concise, Macmillan Advanced Learners, Collins Co-build, Oxford Collocations), but imagine how inconvenient it is to jump from a page to a laptop or a paper back then back to the page. This is why I seriously considered buying some good voluminous pocket electronic dictionary.

Two days ago I purchased it. We took a deep breath and scanned the net together with Kate inside-out looking for something ergonomic, with good amount of words, phrasal verbs support, synonyms, idioms and long battery life. I hoped to find one with the feature to save the words I looked up into a list for the review, but none of a hundred devices we managed to dig out possessed it. We narrowed our search and finished with ECTACO Partner ER300T.

I gave it a couple of days to show himself before writing this short report, just in case something unexpected pops out, but it seems everything is smooth so far. Kate and I, we both are satisfied and happy readers now. You wouldn’t believe how pleasant it makes the whole process. I spend more time on the page and learn more words simply because I don’t lose the context for long periods of time any more. I do need time to record the word in my paper notebook though (for a later review), but it’s incomparable to the expenses we had to take before. Just to give a hint, I finished the second half of The Alien Factor by Stan Lee yesterday, while it had taken more than two weeks to swallow the first. You see my point?

Now just a few words on one innovation we stumbled upon during the research — Quicktionary Pen. It’s a dictionary with an LCD screen with a pen-like form (slightly bigger though). It has a scanner on its tip that picks up the words as you move it over the text. It supports several text styles, including but not limited to inverted text, italics, bold and underlined letters. The thing must be extremely convenient and robs of even less time, but unfortunately we didn’t have the gadget in any shops around to test and make up our own practical opinion; we can only make guesses. Hope this little pointer helps someone in their pocket electronic dictionary research and purchase.

Here’s where I leave you today. Cheers!