Using a Q1 Ultra to Learn Mandarin

Posted by | 09/30/2009 | 5 Comments

I’m working at a Starbucks in Cupertino before heading over to an NVIDIA conference this afternoon. I noticed a gentleman next to me inking on a Samsung Q1 Ultra next to me and struck up a conversation about the device and how he liked it.

Art picked up the Q1 Ultra because he’s learning Mandarin. With a keyboard, he has to type Mandarin phonetically and then wait for Windows to guess what character he’s looking for. If he doesn’t know the proper pronunciation he’s out of luck. He finds it a heck of a lot easier to just ink directly on the screen when he needs to complete his assignments. This also allows him to practice his penmanship.

He was also using a nifty site called Nciku.com that allows him to ink characters, translate text and more.

Unfortunately, the Q1 Ultra does hang from time to time while he’s trying to ink.

Category: Mobile

About the Author (Author Profile)

Xavier Lanier is the publisher of Gotta Be Moible and Notebooks.com. He's a mobile technology geek that uses an iPhone 4S, iPad 2, Galaxy Nexus and Kindle Fire on a daily basis. He's an expert photographer that shoots primarily with Nikon DSLRs. You can follow Xavier on Twitter @xavierlanier and Google+
  • Andrwe

    I got my tablet PC for my Engineering and Mandarin classes (Recent grad looking for work). I found DLTool to be a very helpful program for translation and Vista really made writing characters a lot easier then typing when not sure the proper pinyin for the character. I also found Vista to handle languages better than XP. The writing is nice and if you know the pinyin for the character you can also write the pinyin for the character and it will show the character for you like you typed it in. Tablet PC’s are really nice ways to learn the Asian languages as it provides infinite paper to practice your characters with.

  • SAM

    Cool.
    What software was he using to practice with?

  • http://www.notebooks.com Xavier Lanier

    @SAM Nothing too fancy- he was running Office 2007 with the Chinese language pack. He had Word open when we were chatting, but he also uses One Note. The site Nciku.com was also open.

  • Eve

    Pleco is one of the best tools for Mandarin study, but only available for Palm OS and Pocket PC right now. An iPhone version should be ready soon and then they will start working on the Desktop version which I am looking forward to using with my Tablet PC, though it seems like that one won’t be out for awhile. http://www.pleco.com

  • SAM

    Thanks Eve,
    Looks like this program was invented for tablet pc

    I’ll chack it out. I wonder if it’ll work on a Win Mobile qvga/half screen though? Looks like it was met for full
    Axim vga screens

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