Although also available in German and Spanish versions, I've been looking in detail at the English-French variant:
It's tempting to just start typing a word to look up, but your first character gets taken as the sign to start a new word and then gets lost, so your second character is taken instead. What's needed is to either use 'Options|Enter word' or to simply press Enter/Navigator select, which places a cursor in the bottom-of-screen word box somewhat more intuitively.
Once you get over this initial hurdle though, the interface of this Collins dictionary is nigh-on PERFECT. You can move around every word on screen using the navigator and select it to jump straight to the relevant entry in either language. This hypertext like behaviour is very fast and very powerful. And almost makes looking up words and phrases a pleasure, not something you could claim for many text reference works!
As you can see from the screenshot above, you can also jump to other installed modules (e.g. English-German). The 'Select Dictionary' and 'Toggle Language' options are a bit redundant, with only two languages concerned, I don't think both are needed! The word history function is a great idea:
Because it's so easy to keep clicking through and following your nose, it's handy to be able to browse back through the word history and get back to where you 'were'.
An innovative 'Approximate Search' function means that if no matches are found for your search word then the Collins dictionary tries a few mispellings and comes up with some alternatives - with 80,000 entries in its dictionary, the chances are higher that you'll simply have mis-spelt the word rather than tried a word which isn't included:
The word lookups are as full and helpful as you'd expect from a publisher as big and longstanding as Collins. Also included is a Verb Conjugator, for those that really want to get their foreign language right. Although you can simply type in a verb's name and spelling, most of the time you'll find a verb in the main dictionary and then simply press 'right' to get to the verb tab:
Rather charmingly, the list of verb tenses is in the destination language! Luckily, in everyday life you'll only need a handful of tenses. And if you need more then the chances are that you're a language student and fluent enough to know what the tense names mean!
One final extra is an innovative and surprisingly useful number translator. With their oddities in their number system once you above 69 in the 100, this is particularly useful for quickly writing down numbers in French:
Collins English - French impresses as well by only using up a couple of Megabytes of precious RAM, so it's easy to keep it running in the background, ready for when it's needed. And it understands about different screen resolutions and aspects - these screenshots were on the Nokia E70 in keyboard-opened mode.
A trio of language reference products which are superb value at only $12 (£7) and which I heartily recommend.
Steve Litchfield, 6 March 2007
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