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Review: Lextionary for MS Smartphone - your personal vocabulary enhancer
One of coolest applications for smartphone ever.
Sure, mobile games will always be a killer application for cell phones, but after playing some games you get bored quite quickly and uninstall them after a while. Here comes an application for MS Smartphone that you will NEVER want to uninstall: Lextionary!

What is "Lextionary"? Generally speaking it is an English dictionary, but with a very rich vocabulary and some interesting features.

Lextionary is a big application requiring almost 10 MB so you need an SD card bigger than 8 MB to install it. You can install it by running an install program on desktop Windows or by copying the application´s CAB file to your SD card and running it from the Smartphone.

Lextionary´s application screen generally consists of three areas: a word input area, a search results area and an area for soft keys:

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The version that we reviewed was 1.4:

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... but the software vendor has already announced version 2.0, that is due in June 2003, that will extend search capabilities and will be available for free to registered owners.

The database of Lextionary is based partially on content from Princeton University:

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... and consists not only of word definitions but also presents some significant pieces of history:

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... and covers not only words denoting places but also real-life people:

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Here you can see what kinds of settings are possible in this application:

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... where switching on and off of ClearType is the interesting one. Interesting because ClearType on MS Smartphone seems not to work perfectly (to the left a screen with ClearType, and to the right a screen without cleartype):

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ClearType is a technology based on anti-aliasing that Microsoft developed mainly for Pocket PCs that have higher resolutions than Smarthones. It seems like it is not working well in the Smartphone or maybe our Smartphone (Orange SPV) has too small color depth...

The main menu of the program has the option to switch "Pronunciations" on and off:


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... and here you can see the difference (with pronunciations switched on to the left, and without pronunciations to the right):

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The only weak side of Lextionary is searching. If you don´t spell a word correctly it suggests a list of words:

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... but there is no possibility to enter only a part of the word and find all words that contain this part!!! Not to worry though: the software vendor promised to improve indexing (searching) possibilities in the upcoming version 2.0 that will be available for free for buyers of the current version. Another solution is to switch-on the T9 text input of the Smartphone which makes searches actually easier than on the desktop or on a Pocket PC!

Some notes from the software vendor:

• When scrolling through the word link icons by the side of a word, the direction you need to press on the d-pad can be non-intuitive. This is a limitation of the HTML display control built into the Smartphone. It seems to want to scroll through the icons backwards. Lextionary 2.0 will have a home-grown display engine and this won´t be a problem.
• The back key does work to back out of the app - you just have to press it 2 or 3 times after navigating all the way back in the nav stack.
• Same for in the edit control, click back 2 or 3 times past the beginning and it will nav back in your search results.
• The number keypad has some scroll options: 1 & 4 are page up, 7 & * are page down, 3 & 6 are Home, 9 and # are end.
• Turning on Cleartype is a bad idea - it looks terrible on the SPV.

Conclusions follow below.

Things we like about Lextionary on the MS Smartphone:
- Works great with T9 when searching for a word.
- It´s usually pretty fast.
- Has a huge database that´s highly compressed.
- Works similarly to the Pocket PC version.
- Smartphone and Pocket PC versions are both included with purchase (so if you have MS Smartphone and Pocket PC at the same time then you are at home!
- Word links make it a great tool for professionals, writers and students.

Things we didn´t like:
- no possibility to search for all words that contain certain sequence of letters (T9 switched solves this problem partially though).
- no text-to-speech for pronunciations (VoiceXML technology or some speech engine would help); it is not a big problem though because the pronunciations are there in a textual description.