Callistonian.net

I know the title sounds crazy, but it’s true. My pint-sized electronic dictionary is mind-boggling; it overwhelms people. It redefines the term dictionary by doing things that no dictionary needs to do. But, hey, I’m not complaining.

Perhaps, you’re thinking, “Come on, you’ve got to be kidding. It’s a dictionary. It’s just an electronic version of one of those brick-sized books that dorks use. What can it do besides look up words? It’s not like you can watch movies or use the Internet with it…”

Actually, I can watch movies with it (mpeg, divX, Xvid, wmv…). It also has a non-jacked up Internet browser. I can get live-streaming TV-quality TV on it too. :P I’m not lying.

First and foremost, though, this thing of mine is a dictionary. So, it has what every dictionary must have, a swiveling touch screen!? The screen can rotate 180 degrees, folding flat on itself. Screen rotation sometimes leads to scribbling which sometimes leads to random image creation …

I drew the image to the right, on my dictionary, without installing any applications or modifying its hard/software in anyway.

Moving right along— my dic. has an MP3 player, a calendar, a photo viewer, a radio, a voice recorder, a notepad, a memo pad, a scientific calculator, and converters. It can view PDF files, office documents, text files, and spreadsheets. It can read e-books out loud. It has games, plays flash files, blah blah blah…

All of that stuff is interesting, but by now the cynics must be thinking, “The actual dictionary on this thing must suck” because, well, nothing I’ve mentioned so far has anything to with a dictionary, in the traditional sense of the word. So, let’s go there.

There are lots of dictionaries on my dictionary. I’ve Chinese dictionaries—I don’t even speak Chinese—English dictionaries, Japanese dictionaries, and Korean dictionaries. There are also grammar books, vocabulary builders (i.e. Power Vocab 100,000), other helpful things, and other weird things. Anyway, the dictionaries themselves have all sorts of words in them, as one would expect. But, look at some of the words I found!

:-) is in the dictionary. Do you believe it?

At any rate, my dictionary is real. This is not a joke. It’s i-station’s udic. It costs about $50 more than an iPod touch. Some people give their phones, iPods, computers, and other electronic things names. My dictionary needs a name. Any suggestions?

On a final and truly facetious note, my dictionary can be used as a mask. The girl in the photograph below is clearly using it as a mask. Have you ever seen anyone use an iPod as a mask before? I don’t think so…