ECTACO Partner XL-1500 - Multilingual Talking Electronic Dictionary: English, Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish

I have a terrible experience with ECTACO's electronic dictionary. It was a total waste of my money. I needed a portable dictionary so I bought it directly through ECTACO's web-site, but it was... a trash, very infantry vocabulary determinations and didn't even have almost half of the vocabularies that I needed to find. What more frustrated me was that awful customer service when I tried to return the product. What a reluctant attitude toward return policy service was! They never sent the paper with a return policy in a packet with was within 30 days acception, not only that they told me to call back again and again and made me pass 30 days. Watch out folks! I am a college student working full time still trying to pay off the dept from that terrible dictionary that was not returnable nor helpful at all. I am So sad.

I ordered the XL1500 because I am moving to China for my business. Unfortunately, I had to return the product. The voice feature is so poor, I could barely recognize the english speaking voice, much less the chinese voice. The french, spanish, and german voices were not too bad. I was also disappointed that I could not figure out how to enter pinyin chinese and radical chinese characters, even after reading the poorly written manual three times. The clincher for me was that the headphone jack did not work, it just muted the voice feature altogether. The unit does have an AC jack, but does not come with an AC adaptor. I called Ace Photo to return the product and was informed of the 10% restocking fee.

This is everything it says that it is. It translates and it speaks.

Its translations are fine. I'm not quite sure what the previous reviewer meant when they said it gave them wrong translations. It gave me plenty of choices when I looked words up in German (and a couple other languages), and then checked them out by looking up the given German word or words. If you cross-check its quite easy to find the precisely-nuanced translation.

The speech function sounds robotic, but it is definitely pronounced correctly.

This device functions very well, it easily switches the direction of the language, and has a fast lookup with easy lookup of the defined words. If you switch applications, from dictionary to games to dictionary, you'll have to change the language back to what you were using. It takes a little bit to get used to-ten minutes reading the manual and you're fine. It's annoying to change the batteries, but mine came with an AC adapter, so if you're near an outlet, you'll be fine. Those are some minor issues, but what sets apart this translator is the sheer amount of entries that it has(450,000 per language, plus 200,000 phrases)--nothing else in this price range is even close.

This is easily the best value for anything you'll get in the $100-250 price range.

I bought the Ectaco Partner XL with high hopes it would help me in my Arabic class. My Arabic professor asked me where I got my translations for some of the words because they were not correct. I have found some of the translations useful, but for the most part, incorrect. I contacted the Ectaco and was told that if I wanted Arabic translation I should have bought just the Arabic-English Electric Dictionary instead of one with many languages. I'm hoping the translations for the other languages work better than the Arabic.

My wife is German and I am learning polish. This model had the most words out of the others that I researched for the price. Once you put an hour or two in on the manual usage becomes easy.