Spiffy is the word for Palm's new version of a dictionary that's full of character

For many years, I carried the Oxford Concise English-Chinese, Chinese-English Dictionary with me wherever I went.

By itself, it was not too awkward, but these days I have a mobile phone, a personal digital assistant and a lot of other things, and the little dictionary became something of a pest.

All that changed last year when I obtained the Palm version of the dictionary. I reviewed it then, and thought it was a great deal.

The new version is even better. It comes with high-resolution fonts if you do not have a Chinese operating system, and will handle both simplified and traditional Chinese characters.

The new fonts look very spiffy indeed if you are using something like the Sony Clie, which I am. It allows you to create custom dictionaries, and finally supports Palm OS 5. It is also possible to store the big dictionaries on a memory card, thus saving some of that precious Ram.

The new version supports the creation of Flash Cards for those who wish to test themselves. The idea is great, but the execution needs more work.

I found the whole process of creating a set of Flash Cards rather too complex for it to be of any use.