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I remember when Microsoft killed off MyPhone and the Windows Mobile app store.

http://www.bgr.in/news/microso...

What that meant was "Windows Mobile is dead. All your favourite mobile applications already run on Android and iOS and don't work on Windows Phone. Time to migrate to one of those".

In my case my favourite application was Pleco, a Chinese dictionary. That worked on Windows Mobile and now runs on iOS and Android and not on Windows Phone.

Now Windows Mobile was never a commercial success, except compared to Windows Phone.

Still you'd think their cloud stuff should be safe right? Well not anymore. Shutting down servers is a bad sign - it usually means a wider cull of products is in process at Microsoft.

It's dumb too - if you tell people the product they are using is being killed off and they need to migrate, they're just as likely to migrate to the competition as they are to the Microsoft product you want them to migrate to.

Pleco Software ( http://www.pleco.com/ ) has a version of this for their excellent Chinese dictionary software. There's a video of the prototype at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7VTo0656Rc

I'm not sure if the above works on the latest (4th-gen) iPod Touch with camera, or only iPhone.

I'm not affiliated with Pleco, other than as a very happy customer of theirs for about 8 years. I first got their electronic Chinese dictionary software for a Palm Pilot back then, and then more recently migrated (for free) to their iOS version for my iPod Touch. The dictionaries they license aren't cheap, but they're very good, and their software and support is great; I highly recommend them.

I think there's an argument that they should have an "Apple like" product which they do in house and a "Windows Mobile" like OS they license to third parties.

Right now they're trying to replace Windows Mobile 6.5 - which runs Pleco very well with Windows Phone 7 which probably won't ever.

It would make more sense to have Windows Phone 7 as their internal Apple like (i.e. locked down but slick) product and keep Windows Mobile going for people that have software for it they want to keep using.

If they really do replace the WinMo6.5 with WinPhone 7 there's a serious chance that it will be rejected by the sort of people who buy iPhones (why not stick just buy an iPhone?) and the sort of people who'd have bought a Windows Mobile Device. Why buy a phone which won't run your old software. In fact if you look at the Pleco site the software will work on an iPhone. The developers are fairly irritated by the whole thing

http://www.plecoforums.com/viewtopic.php?p=18657#p18657

I'm done paying for mobile platform/carrier specific apps. If my need is critical enough to spend real money on (like the $100 for Pleco) I'll buy the best app I can find for Windows 7 desktop and just run it on one of the W7 tablet/hand-held devices coming out in the future giving me long-term investment protection. What I won't do again is invest in an application where there's a likelihood support for my platform will be dropped because of the ever-changing state of the mobile phone market, especially when it forces me to choose both a new hardware vendor and potentially lock into an undesirable wireless carrier. At least on Windows I know my app will work essentially forever.

I certainly understand your frustration - it's 10x worse on this end, I'd much much rather have spent the last year-and-a-half working on adding features on WM than rewriting the same darn program again for a different platform (or possibly two). Investing $100 in an application that might drop support for your platform is bad, investing several orders of magnitude more money than that in developing an application for a platform whose manufacturer drops support for it is even worse. (as happened on both Palm and WM about a year apart, though at least Palm had the decency to make some attempt at backwards-compatibility - Microsoft just plain screwed us, which is why I found myself feeling a bit of schadenfreude when the Kin turned into the latest iteration of Microsoft Bob)

We try to make it a bit easier on our customers by allowing free platform transfers whenever we can (though it does complicate matters somewhat on the business end) but we're very much hoping that the market will finally stabilize soon so that we can stop having to chase the latest mobile platforms and just focus all of our energies on making our software better.

I.e. they wrote an app for PalmOS, which was dropped. Then they wrote an app for Windows Mobile which is in the process of being dropped for Windows Phone 7 which will not support native Windows CE applications, only .Net ones.

I really have no idea what Microsoft are thinking by disabling support for Windows Mobile apps in Windows Phone. It's like if they'd launched Vista with no support for Win32 applications when most of those applications already run on Macs and Macs had a much larger market share.

I like this on WinMo.

http://www.pleco.com/

It's a Chinese to English dictionary and is Windows Mobile/PalmOS only. I.e. not Symbian or Android.

Also I can get GPS maps of Taiwan in English on WinMo.

WinMo has a lot more software vendors for things like this than Symbian because it's not very hard to port Windows desktop applications to WinMo. And I think in Asia there's a lot of people with Windows mobile devices and frankly a lot of cracked WinMo software.

Cellphones APPS DO NOT SELL IF THEY ARE EXPENSIVE

Eh. I've paid in total $200 for a single Windows Mobile application (what it adds up to when you add almost all the dictionaries). That program has sold pretty well too, I believe.

"I Can READ That!" is a gentle introduction to reading Chinese characters, focused on stuff you'd see while traveling in China. Won't really teach you how to say anything, though.

For self-paced learning of conversational Mandarin, nothing beats the Pimsleur language programs. I can say from personal experience that after listening to just the first-level program, you will be able to ask for stuff in restaurants (and drop a few jaws in the process if you don't look Asian!), hold simple conversations with Chinese speakers, and start to make a little sense of the dialogue in Chinese movies and TV shows. There are three levels, each with about 15 hours of material.

If you have a Palm handheld, PlecoDict absolutely rocks for building up your vocabulary of both spoken and written Mandarin. It has a great graduated-interval flashcard mode.

The New Practical Chinese Reader is the latest edition of the textbook that's been used in just about every introductory Chinese language course in the English-speaking world in the last couple of decades. It is available with cassette tapes to help with pronunciation.

For more vocabulary, both spoken and written, Rosetta Stone is good. Its major weakness is that it uses the same vocabulary words for all the languages it covers, and the word list is based on some Western assumptions; some things that take just one word in a typical western language take several in Mandarin, and you find yourself getting a small flood of new words with no clear idea of exactly what each one means on its own. But once you've learned the basic conjunctions and so on, that's not a big deal.

For actually learning how to write (stroke order) there's Easy Chinese Tutor, not a great piece of software but the material is decent and it even comes with a bunch of character tracing sheets you can print out and practice on.

Zhongwen.com has a bunch of good resources.

What I really want, though, is for someone to do the equivalent of Destinos for Mandarin. Maybe in the form of a historical kung-fu soap opera comedy drama fantasy like the awesome Tian Xia Di Yi. I'd pay good money for that!

Take a look at PADict - open-source Palm OS Japanese dictionary with built-in Japanese fonts and handwriting recognizer.

(shameless plug) My company, Pleco Software makes a similar product for Chinese, and we've found that for a lot of people ready access to a character dictionary can greatly assist with their studies and their later word recall.