Smartcell TextPlus review

Verdict:

Review Date: 22 Feb 2006

Price when reviewed: (around £11)

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

The word completion facility built into every Pocket PC is certainly a timesaver when you're inputting text, but it's fairly limited.

It pops up a list of suggested words as you type, but you can't add your own words, and all the spellings are in US rather than UK English.

TextPlus, which is already well established on Palm handhelds, provides an editable dictionary with English spellings, and adds any unknown words to its database as you enter them for the first time. To increase the chance of finding the word you're looking for, TextPlus keeps track of the words you use most frequently, putting them at the top of its list. You can configure how many words appear in the suggestion dialog, and specialist technical dictionaries are available, as well as a variety of foreign languages. It also comes with a free PC-based Database Builder that enables you to create your own dictionaries on the desktop.

TextPlus handles phrases as well as individual words, which can save huge amounts of time in repetitive typing or scribbles. Frustratingly, though, you can't add new phrases on the handheld and have to use the companion PC application. The only other downside is that you have to pick a single input method to work with TextPlus (such as the built-in keyboard), and can only re-assign it to work with a different input method from the program's preferences screen. Still, it worked with all the input methods we tried, including the four built-in options, plus CalliGrapher (www.phatware.com) and the Fitaly keyboard (www.fitaly.com).

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