Sharp Electronics PW-E550 Electronic Dictionary

This thing is cool!! I've had it for a few weeks now, and I've been raving about it to everyone. I just slip it in my pocket and it's ready to go when I stumble across a word I don't know while reading The Economist or maybe some novel, while I'm on the train to work. Also, it's been particularly handy in studying words that show up on the GRE test. It doesn't read the words to you, but if you can read phonetics, you're set! Have fun!

Upon looking up yet another word in the novel I was reading, I said to my husband "there must be a nice little electronic dictionary available with all the other devices on the market." Lo and behold I went online to Amazon and there was just what I needed! No longer am I killing my wrist picking up our large heavy dictionary. I have my handy dandy Sharp the size of my palm and get more than enough information about the word I am looking up. It is absolutely wonderful! Sharon Seck

I rate this excellent for portability and quite convenient to learn new words without fumbling over dictionary pages.

This electronic dictionary has been an absolute joy to use. I'm sort of a printed dictionary collector, and there's a list of esoteric words that I look up (e.g., grok) to gauge a dictionary's quality. Whether a word is defined, how easy the definition is to understand, and how complete the definition is can usually tell you what kind of dictionary it is. The dictionary that the PW-E550 contains, the The New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) - 1st Edition, passed my layman quality test with flying colors even though I prefer the New New Oxford Dictionary of English (NODE), which is very hard to find in the States and is out of most people's price range. Many lexicographers would argue that NODE is the better dictionary, but hey since NODE is OOP and there's no electronic dictionary based on it, the NOAD rules supreme. As a reference, here is the PW-E550's definition of "grok": grok |gräk| v. (grokked, grokking) [trans.] _informal_ understand (something) intuitively or by empat... Read more

I hope someone could point me to where and how to get this repaired before the one year warranty expires. Here's what happened. About a couple of weeks ago, my PW-E550 suddenly went into an infinite loop of "initializing...", and I could not get it out by pressing the "reset" button on its back, changing to a new battery, or anything. As soon as I press the power "on" button, the device started to ask me to "Do you want to initialize?" *Press [Y] to initialize *Press [N] not to initialize and no matter which key I pressed, it stayed at the above. Did anyone encounter the same problem? I bought this on July 18, 2008, and it's now July 11, 2009, I have fewer than 10 days left before the one year warranty expires. I also bought another one of this same brand from ebay about 6-8 months before the above one from amazon. I gave it to my son who was just started his high school then. The ebay one costed about twice as much as the amazon one since it was sent fro... Read more