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 just got the XL-1500 as a present from my new husband and I have to say that I was very impressed. I already had another model from Ectaco for France but since we were planning to visit several countries he decided we should have this 15 language version. We are going on a grand tour through Europe for our honeymoon and I can wait to try it out in real life situations. It's incredible how much information is in this little machine and I can't believe how easy it is to use. It works just as well as the other one I had and we have already learned some phrases that we will need when we arrive in each country. We tried it out at this little Spanish restaurant near our house and it worked so well! The waiter was surprised at first because we pretended not to speak English and we surprised him after! We got everything we wanted plus a big smile!

I was so dissapointed by this product. I had hoped to use it to identify and translate Japanses words and practice pronouncing them correctly.
It takes many steps to do simple translations. This was frustrating in a relaxed atmopshere. It would be near impossible underpressure.
When you press for the talking translation it sounds like a tired robot in a large can. Extremely difficult to identify what it is saying let alone try and duplicate it.
The other deal breaker was it only uses batteries. There is no way to charge it when not in use. You would need to carry around a case of batteries while traveling in order to use it throughout a trip.
The size was compact and light, that was a nice feature.