Best Chinese hand writing tablet to get?

[salcanzonieri]

Those hand held tablets where you use a stylus to draw a chinese character and it shows you the name of the character in pinyin and the meaning in English,
can anyone recommend any of the better ones?

[wetmarble]

I'm a big fan of pleco, which is an app for ios or android. The handwriting recognition is awesome, does both regular characters and script. Stroke order is not important. They have a variety of dictionaries with more being licensed regularly. Lastly, they have some awesome tools, such as the ability to use the camera of your phone to scan characters and see instant translation.

https://www.pleco.com/

[monkey]

Hi Sal

+1 for Pleco.

It's the best I've come across and the company is nice
to deal with.

Phil

[BajiFreak]

+1 for Pleco

As said above their handwriting recognition is excellent, far better than other software I have tried so far (Wenlin, etc.). Even better, Pleco has an OCR add on that is absolutely awesome : just make a picture/scan of a character or text you can't read, and it instantaneously transforms it in OCR version, with links to translation from the various doctionaries you have installed. Compared to other OCR softs I have tested (capture2text, iOCR), the precision of Pleco is incredibly better ...

[NoSword]

+1 for Pleco

[bailewen]

Those hand held tablets where you use a stylus to draw a chinese character ...

What is this? 2002 or so? Get a damn smartphone already. Who the fuck still uses a stylus.
[/quote]

And, FWIW, I installed Pleco on my iPhone but basically never ever use it. I found KTdict far more useful. All the bright colors and other eye candy on Pleco are, IMO, distracting. And i guess it's cool you can use the camera to recognize a character....for $15!!! Kind of a fortune for an iPhone app. Those things, if not free, are usually just a couple bucks. 5 bucks top. No way I'm payiing 15 bucks for such a basic functionality.

the other classic, the one that most Chinese users rely on, is 金山词霸。 It has really in depth definitions and all that but I usually find KEdict gets what I need quicker.

One final note, for the iPhone, as far as character recognition goes, just make sure you have installed the keyboard: 简体手写 or 繁体手写。 That will take care of your needs to be able to input a character that you don't know how to read.

One last tip...when you are using your finger to draw a character that you are not familiar with, the way to prevent the software from deciding you have finished "writing" and present suggstions when you have actually only drawn half the character and are looking at the character again to get the last few strokes....is to make sure you don't lift your finger up from the screeen untill you are absolutely finihsed inputting the character.

Pleco is ok. But I installed both Pleco and KEdcit and, over time, I have found I now never go to pleco any more. I fine KEdict much more streamlined.

[Michael]

I can't recommend specific models, but some smartphones are in the middle of being big enough for all needed visuals yet not so big as tablets. Samsung seems to have popularized this, but I know a lot of people who buy Samsungs in China and the screens break so easily. Not sure if the quality is higher outside China, well sure that it is, but don't know if specifically better for the screens.

Huawei, a Chinese manufacturer, also makes Android phones that compare well for features and price.

My experience with any electronics in China is that the prices are higher here and quality lower from the same manufacturer and model. Whatever you get, better to buy it in the West, Japan, or South Korea. Because of fakes, I no longer buy in Hong Kong either. China contaminates the world with fakes.

[Lu da]

Pleco is awesome.

[Orpheus]

If you're looking for something because you're learning Chinese, I would recommend PLECO. I use it on my Samsung phone with no problems.

Its fullscreen handwriting function is solid, even if you don't know the stroke order. You can also enter pinyin to look up characters. It also has access to a wide variety of dictionaries, and I believe they now offer a Cantonese dictionary for those so inclined.

You can also use it to look up stroke order, which shows the order step by step. This is what I used to learn stroke order, because very quickly patterns emerge.

Their customer service is extremely good.

[MiaoZhen]

I would also throw my hat in the ring for Pleco. When I first started learning Asian languages in college (originally Japanese), there were no electronic dictionaries or smart anythings. Carrying around Nelson's dictionary was the height of technology. Instead, carrying around Pleco on my iPhone has made learning Chinese much easier.

For those of you who practice and/or are interested in Chinese medicine (this is the real reason I'm replying to this post), you can now add Wiseman's A Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine to Pleco as an add-on. It is a bit expensive, but less than the print version. As a long term practitioner and teacher of Chinese medicine I believe this book is one of the single best references out of all Chinese medicine books available in English today. Having it in my pocket at any time is a fantastic enough reason alone for me to have Pleco on my phone.

[Michael]

Since a lot of people like Pleco, here's what they say about which device to use.
http://www.pleco.com/support.html

Should I choose iOS or Android?

The depth of feeling on both sides of this debate is such that we don’t want to even hint that we might think one platform is superior in general to the other one. However, for what it’s worth we can state objectively that our iOS sales are roughly 4x our Android sales, and that those numbers appear to be fairly typical among other mobile app developers - we have lots of users on Android, but the bulk of our revenue comes from iOS. So we tend to spend a bit more time on iOS than on Android development because of that.

Our iOS version also has a few more features than our Android version does, though this is more due to technical considerations than any favoring of one platform or the other. iOS includes built-in support for decoding PDF files while Android does not, so our document reader on iOS can reader PDFs and our document reader on Android can't; likewise for Word/RTF documents. iOS also has a better and more consistent font rendering engine, so we're able to do much nicer things with typography on iOS than we can currently do on Android. (both the PDF and the typography gap are set to narrow in the new Android L, though)

So if you simply want to choose the platform that has the best version of Pleco, at the present time that platform is iOS. And absent a dramatic shift in where our sales come from, that seems unlikely to change anytime soon.
Which device should I buy?

iOS: if you're getting a new device, we think the $100 premium for an iPhone 5S / Retina iPad Mini over an iPhone 5C / non-Retina iPad Mini is more than worth it for the improved specifications, particularly after we upgrade our OCR engine to take advantage of 64-bit processors. The newest iPod Touch is a pretty good value and should also run Pleco fine if you want a pocket-sized non-phone device.

Among used iOS devices, we're about to start requiring iOS version 7 as a minimum, and plan to be fairly aggressive in requiring iOS 8 early next year, so we wouldn't get anything older than an iPhone 4S, an iPad 2 or the newest (5th-generation) iPod Touch. We would also recommend that you avoid the iPad 3, since its processor was really too slow to drive its Retina Display and as a consequence it's just about the slowest device for running Pleco that you can get; the iPad 2 and iPad 4 are both better choices.

Android: for Android, we recommend that you get one of Google's Nexus phones / tablets; they're a very good value for the features they include, and because they're from Google they always run the latest, best, most stable version of Android you can get. Devices from other manufacturers like Samsung tend to be overpriced and to add a lot of extra customizations that only serve to make Android worse, on top of which it's rare for them to receive operating system updates as quickly as Google's own devices do. At this point in the evolution of mobile devices, having the newest software matters much more than having the newest hardware, and the best way to make sure that you get access to that with Android is to buy a Nexus.