Electronic talking dictionary and Audio Travel PhraseBook ECTACO Partner E15C800: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, English, Farsi, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian

I bought the Ectaco 800 Version (15 languages/Chinese). Since I also needed Korean, I bought an MMC for Korean (card with Korean) as well. Beware prospective buyers, it's not worth more than $200, and that's being generous. You will only feel excited when you are opening the package, after that, it's all down hill.

1) the speech synthesis is computer generated and poor (if you know the word/phrase it is speaking then you will probably understand what is said, otherwise, it is pretty useless)
2) going from English to Korean/other language is fine, but going from the foreign language back to English is ridiculous
- you have to bring up a special menu on the screen to enter the foreign letters (at least for languages that do not use the English alphabet), this blocks half of the screen, making it difficult to see possible word choices (quite clumsy to use)
- you can enter the letters of the foreign language from the keyboard, but not until you open the menu
3) as for multiple languages, they must be purchased on the same card, you cannot add languages to a single card (you can, but the unit will not acknowledge that it is there), so you must switch cards (I have to switch cards when I go from Chinese to Korean)
- this is quite annoying, but worse, you have to turn the unit off and reset it when you change the card
- if that isn't annoying enough, you have to wait for it to perform an upgrade which takes over a minute (it upgrades every time you switch cards)
- all your preferences are reset to default when you perform the switch
4) the spoken translation feature is grossly exaggerated in the promotions
- you can speak an English phrase and it will translate it, but you have to select a specific category from a menu
- if you want to say, "I'm checking out," you have to first bring up the phrase book menu, select the hotel option, then select the payment option, then say your phrase (of course, this assumes that you already know that checking out is under payment options in the hotel option category)
- if you want to say, "have a good day," you have to exit and go through the selection process again to get to the appropriate menu, then you can say it
- it often gets your statement wrong (you have to say exactly the phrase it has in the category)
- it is not practical or convenient (very tedious)
5) the English dictionary is not substantial and you have to enter the word correctly
- if you enter the word WORTHLES without the final S, for example, it will process and come back with no matches found (that's right, there is no list that appears as you type your word)
- the foreign dictionary, oddly enough, does have a word list that pops up as you type, but you have to switch dictionaries after you find your word (minor inconvenience)
- the phrase book and foreign dictionary don't even contain phrases you would expect, for example, if you want to say, "I love you," in the target language, well, too bad, the expression isn't listed anywhere (not in English, not in the target language)
6) the unit itself has zero storage, so to play MP3 music, you have to load it to the dictionary card
- the card is less than a gig and is already half occupied by the dictionary data
- the data on the card can be lost or erased, including the dictionaries (so definitely back
up the card onto your computer before you actually load things to it)
- the unit ($600+) is nothing more than a paperweight without the card inserted
7) as noted in 6) above, the software for the unit is on a card, but it is not protected, you can delete it, once you have lost the dictionary or corrupted it, it's gone (hopefully you have made a back up copy before actually using the card)
8) I have also had problems with the power/battery life
- after the first week, the unit completely discharges overnight, whether I have used it for 1 minute or 15 minutes (I become discouraged with the device quickly enough that I never use it longer than 10 or 15 minutes a day)
9)I have only had the unit for about two weeks, but using the other features it has to offer are equally disappointing

Overall, a very big waste of money. I can't even bring myself to try and sell it on e-bay, my conscience won't let me. I waited two weeks before writing this review because I wanted to convince myself that the unit isn't so bad (it's hard for me to accept that I blew this much money). For $600+, it's a piece of garbage. (I could select a better word than `garbage', but I didn't want the review to be blocked).