Ectaco ER586HT English/Russian Talking Electronic Dictionary

The ER586HT lets you send faxes and send and receive e-mail using E-mail Around-the-Globe, and you can translate the e-mail automatically. You can use the digital voice recorder to record personal memos. The tourist phrase book translates up to 10,000 English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Dutch words into Russian. A phone book lists area codes for more than 2,000 cities in Russia, the United States, and other countries.

You can customize the dictionary with new words by typing them on the keyboard or downloading them from your PC. The ER586HT's dictionary offers built-in English grammar rules, a real-time Test of English as a Foreign Language course, English sentence construction, frequently used phrases, 18 sections of specialized reference, and a list of irregular verbs and American idioms.

The built-in organizer includes both business and personal directories, an electronic notepad with one-touch search, and an option for sending documents by e-mail or fax. A scheduler with a memo option also supports data exchange with your PC. You can store a list of important dates and view your calendar. The ER586HT supports a shorthand writing system and a drawing board for sketches--and you can even send your sketches by fax.

Additional options include a traveler's guide, horoscopes, a game center with four popular games, a U.S. citizenship exam, a math and engineering calculator, a personal account manager, a loan calculator, math formulas, currency and metric conversion, a database of English names, clothes and footwear sizes, and an option to upload text files.

95% of my wife's usage is single word translations and seldom uses full sentence or pronunciation features. Although she is quite fluent, she still uses it often when she comes across odd words in some books, or needs an equivalent of a technical or other very precise term she only knows in Russian. Her mother and sister are less fluent and use sentence translation and pronunciation much more often. Oddly, the men hardly ever use the translator. No one uses the other organizer features on the unit. We favor this unit rather than the 486 model due to its larger dictionary. A side benefit is that looks much nicer with its leather like case and attractive silver styling. The pronunciation is useful for beginning to intermediate speakers, because it gives you an idea of the kind of sound you should try to make. However, it has the typical computer robotic sound to it- do not expect anything like a recording of actual human speakers. It turns out this robotic accent is not important- the big problems I've found for Russians first speaking English would be solved if they listenned to this unit pronouncing the word for them.

Also do not have super high expectations for the sentence translator. It is not a fault of Ectaco- Machine translation is a very hard problem and no one has a translator you can trust completely. The translator is very handy and can be used to give someone some hints about what you are trying to communicate. But don't expect to get it right more than 70% of the time. Some checks you can do to verify the translation is to try translating the english words back into russian and see if most of the meanings are the one you intended. If the word has too many different or possibly disasterous meanings, obviously it might be a good idea to substitute a russian synonym to get an english word translation with less chance of creating confusion. Obviously this is a lot of work, and it is probably unnecessary to go to this much trouble in typical situations. Just to give you an idea, my mother in law regularly went into the city to go shopping and at that time knew only a few english phrases. Armed with this translator (and a cell phone for emergencies)- she found it easy to complete all her tasks. She only had to call us once to explain some complicated detail to a salesperson.

We bought the accessories for this (that allow you to hook to a computer) but I'd suggest that you hold off and buy them only if you really think you would use them. We tried them but never got much value from them.

We strongly suggest using NIMH (nickel metal hydride) rechargeable batteries. This will save you huge amounts of money if you use the translator a lot. Radio shack has good quality ones. We have tried other generic brands, but they most failed after several charges.

Hope these notes help.


Very useful and fun   September 19, 2001
Anna (Russia)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

I found this dictionary very useful to learn English words. I often play in different word games on it to enlarge my vocabulary. What I really adore about this dictionary is the touch-sensitive display, it's fun to send emails and do everything with a small stylus!
I have specially chosen this dictionary to have the TOEFL listening comprehension and all the other tests as well as grammar reference.
The dialogues for every day situations have often helped me when I had no idea how to say something in English.
My dictionary translates all the words and even common phrases and idioms. And the most important for me is that it not only pronounces clearly everything, but records my pronunciation, so I can always compare them and speak better. English pronunciation is so different from the Russian one ...
Thanks to this dictionary, I speak English much better now. :)


It's a legend in both features and price!   April 13, 2001
Ehab El-Behiry (Cairo, Egypt)
0 out of 3 found this review helpful

I bought this product two weeks ago, my product is Arabic -English dictionary. It's a legend electronic dictionary with English-Arabic, Arabic-English, English-English dictionaries and Arabic & English speller. Data base of vocublary, dialog, grammer, proverbs, abbreviation, travel & country information, cities, languages, airports, airlines, temperature, telephone id's. Organizer with business tel., personal tel., memo, schedule, user dictionary, calender(Gregory & Higri), local & world time, anniversity and voice memo. Calculations with simple & scientific calculator, loan calculator, account mangement, currency conversion, metric conversion. Games of word, brick, title 5 & master mind game. Communication with pc link, fax machine built in, email(send & recieve). All these features and it's english talking with male true voice and it has back light touch screen and the its memory is 2MB. These features are the shiny side of this product where the other side appear in its exaggerated price and its short life of the best batteries in this product.


ER586HT   April 4, 2001
Nathan (LA, USA)
2 out of 7 found this review helpful

Perfect tool, great features and fulfilling vocabulary. But the manual needs to be written in a simpler manner. Too many technical terms that are not easy to understand for people who are not familiar with these terms. I think it should be more so-to-speak "housewife friendly". -- I give it four stars.


Poor quality and terrible support   December 20, 2000
S. Plaski (Florida)
21 out of 21 found this review helpful

I bought ER586HT English/Russian from Ectaco and it was inoperable out of the box. Some buttons did not work at all. The store only had 7 days return policy so I had to bring it to the Ectaco store in Queens, NY. I was told they would call me within 2 weeks. It took me 5 weeks and multiple calls to get a replacement which... had the same problem. Now it has been 3 weeks again, no word from Ectaco.

Summary: good product idea, very poor implementation, absolutely the worst warranty and customer service I have ever seen.