[Japanese] Electronic Dictionary app for Android?

[Sakura90]

Hi :3

I need to buy a cel now, but I can't decide between good ol' Symbian (N5800 or C5-03) or Android (something in the line of a Xperia X8). Yeah, I know Android is gazillon times better and has 2 millon apps, but "low-end" Android phones don't look very appealing and I don't give a "smartphone" a very "smart" use . GPS, music, image viewer, some game and basic functions are enough. I won't use 400 apps or 70 homescreens.

BUT (there's always one), I just realised how much I wanted a 電子辞書 (electronic dictionary, Japanese ofc), and obviously, there are none for Symbian. So, is there any app for Android that works like an electronic dictionary? With kanji look up and all the pretty functions they have, including Japanese-English and vice-versa, the "jump" function between dictionaries, etc. Also Japanese support for writing outside the app, much like Windows IME. To sum up, "Japanese experience" in Android . The only thing I don't want [for now] is the full phone in Japanese as I'm still not THAT good with kanjis

I'll search the series of tubes later today, after getting some sleep, now I can barely write this. The thing is I need to decide tomorrow at much and if you know something it'd be useful

[Bob2004]

I have an HTC Desire (great phone btw), and there are a number of Japanese dictionaries on the marketplace, including several for free. The only one I've tried is called JED, and that has ~320,000 words and ~4500 kanji (it's not as comprehensive as some dictionaries, but it's very good for most purposes. It supports searching for Kanji by radicals, has hiragana/katakana tables for reference, and supports tagging dictionary entries for easy reference too.

Honestly, it's not as full featured as I'd like (I'd really love an app with symbol recognition - so you could draw a kanji on the screen, and it identifies it for you, instead of having to search for it manually), but it's pretty good.

http://iphone.jisho.org/ is a much better dictionary, with more words/kanji, and better definitions, and it's 'search by radical' function seems to be better too, but it is entirely online, so no good if you don't have net access. It should work on most phones, there's a mobile version and a keitai version too which are all slightly different.

My phone also seems to have no trouble displaying Japanese characters, but I'm not sure if that's because they got installed as part of JED, or if they were already available. I have no idea how to type in Japanese though.

[Sakura90]

Nice . But no online where I need it, only at home. So it has to be offline 100% (except for updates, obviously). Looking in the Android market there are TONS of Jap apps. Aedict sounds great, it was handwritten recognition.

http://code.google.com/p/aedict/

Android marketplace: https://market.android.com/details?id=sk.baka.aedict&feature=search_result


There are keyboards too, this looks pretty standard. There were more but couldn't get much from the screens, this one looks more like a "regular" keyboard

http://sites.google.com/site/owplus/

Android marketplace: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.owplus.ime.cupcake.openwnnplus

If you'd like to try those or any another in the marketplace you can find it'll be great, specially I'd like to know how the handwritten recognition is. But now I'm definitely going for an Android phone

And another thing, you can't use optical pencils with capacitive screens, right? Only with resistive ones. May try to look for resistive screen, as music player and Jap dictionary are going to be the main uses of the phone