Wizcom’s Quicktionary TS vaults us back, spiritually, to certain artifacts of the 1990s. Do you remember when “scanners” were Hand-held combs the size of frying pans, which one would have to carefully drag across the page being scanned? This $190 successor is much the same thing, but now has a more focused purpose–it looks up words and tells you what they mean–and is only the size of an adult forearm.
Quicktionary TS [Wizcom via Oh Gizmo!]



It’s just not that hard to type a word in on a small keyboard.
This used to be called Questron. :p
Is there a Japanese version?
I have something that tells me what words mean, too. My wife.
I have one of the first model Quicktionaries from at least 7 years ago. It’s a goofy little gadget which takes longer to scan, OCR, and look up a word than it would take any normal human to find it in a normal dictionary. My favorite part about it is that if it can’t OCR whatever you’re trying to scan, you can “type” it in manually via a series of barcodes laid out all QWERTY-like on the back of the carrying case. If I remember correctly it has some primitive speech synthesis that will pronounce and define the word for you as well, if that’s what you fancy. It’s good to see that in however many years between when mine was made and now, that they haven’t made any serious form factor changes, like perhaps making it smaller or less dildonic. They have made it redder though, so that’s a start!
I’ll stick with Hot For Words, thanks.