Customer Reviews

PalmOne PalmPak Dictionary/Thesaurus Card (m125, m130, i705 & m500 series)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I bought this product because it has Palm name on the product. What a mistake. It takes 12-16 seconds to just open up the application! Out of curiousity, I tried other dictionary software on a memory card and most of them don't take more than 5 seconds to open up. Also, searching for word in this product is a major problem. You need to know the exact spelling of the word. And, it takes another five seconds for the software to find each word. Maybe my Palm M505 is too slow for this software, but I doubt that's the reason. The only good thing about this product is that the content is from Merriam-Webster, if you can stand the wait time!

If you are ever thinking about buying this product, I urge you to reconsider. There are other products that you can get, and Palm should be ashamed to put out a product with such poor performance. Since there is no way to try the product out before buying and it's hard to return the product once you have opened the package, I feel that most customers will be fooled by the sweet little Palm logo. But, please do reconsider.

I have been using Franklin-Bookman Power Dictionaries with Thesaurus and several Bookman Cards for foreign languages for years, and I was very excited to buy this card.
The product is good, but I have to admit somehow a little be my disappointment.

1) There is no way to jump directly from the Dictionary Entry to the Thesaurus entry and vice versa.
2) The Dictionary&Thesaurus load slowly, but you get use to it.
3) In case of verbs, the third person singular in present is not available, which is very important for someone who has to struggle with verbs ending.
4) Also is missing, the plural form.
5) It will be nice if as soon as you begin to enter a word in a text input field, you receive a list of suggested words. From these you can then select the desired word.
6) When searching for a word, the spell correction can take over a minute.
7) Once you have the definition of a word, but do not understand the meaning of an other word within that definition, you cannot select that word to look at the definition.
8) The Palm PalmPak Dictionary/Thesaurus Card is "read only", so there is no way to add or customize your entry.
9) It will nice to know how many words, definitions and thesaurus entries are accessible.

Did I scare you? I hope not.

Would I buy the card anyway? Of course, I bought it already.

If you don't care about what I said, the Palm PalmPak Dictionary/Thesaurus is otherwise excellent.

I keep this plugged into my Palm m515 at all times -- it's a great reference tool, and it saves a lot of memory having this on a card rather than having such a big file stored on your handheld.

This card has the whole Webster's 10th collegiate dictionary in it! That is really cool. I would much rather carry this than the big printed version. I have really liked having this with me when writing papers and the like.

There are a lot of words listed and it's a handy assortment. The definitions are short and to the point, with pronunciation and a few bits about the roots of the words. Most importantly it has dirty words. Dictionaries that lack dirty words are a pet peeve, pointing to a prudishness that likely affects the overall quality of the dictionary's editing: if they can't trust us to restrain ourselves from drooling and writhing over the excitement of reading poo-poo words, can we trust the editing in other matters?

There are some helpful Appendices/Tables for general knowledge (Zodiac signs, metric system, Morse code, and about two dozen others) that can be handy for bar bets or if stranded on an island with a meter stick and an astrologer.

The Thesaurus is similarly sleek in content. There aren't any cross-links between words that I could find, but that's a nicety, not a necessity. Overall I'm pleased with the purchase. Alas, there's no color, and no illustrations, so if you need to insult someone with: "In the dictionary next to 'stupid' there's a picture of you!" carry around a regular book to point at.

The content is good, but the programming is sloppy.
It is unacceptably slow and there is no link from the Dictonary Side to the Thesaurus side.

It's slow to use, but is miles ahead of any alternative I've found. If it's thorough content you're after, it's hard to beat ~500,000 headwords (if I remember correctly) with complete definitions, pronunciations & etymologies. I got it on a lark & have been amazed at how handy it is to always have the complete M-W Collegiate dictionary in my pocket -- I use it constantly.

Other than a 15 second start-up time, and an interface designed more for a novel than a dictionary/thesaurus (though still full-featured), the only other complaint I have is an undocumented (as fas as I've found) requirement that there be somewhere around 600K of free memory in the device. Otherwise it dumps you unceremoniously back into whatever app you used last.

I'm planning to get a Sony Clie, and the only thing holding me back is the lack of dictionaries as thorough as this one that don't require SD/MMC slots.

Palm is now selling the 11th edition of Merriam Webster dictionary, and with rebate, the cost is less than this one. It might even be in color.

You'll never believe how often this comes in handy. I use this all the time to get the correct spelling of a word or to look up a definition. I got if for only occasional reference but ended up using it much, much more than I thought I would. It's so fast and easy! Definitely one to keep with you all the time.

I've used this many times since buying and and agree with others who say this is an absolute must have with a compatible palm. I don't know how I got along with out it.