Some impressions on an electronic dictionary

Before leaving Australia I got $5 bargain off eBay on a second hand Franklin/Ad-dawliah BAS-1595 Arabic/English dictionary. Unfortunately for me my mosquito repellant leaked in my suitcase and it caused my dictionary to work intermittedly for a while, then it stopped, then I pulled it apart and got it to work again for a while but now it seems dead. So once again I'm on the market.

Today I looked at a Atlas SD900 which has a black & white backlit screen, a touch screen with stylus, something like 3 million words. It does not pronouce the Arabic words out loud but impressively it has short vowels on all the words which is the next best thing. But something seems missing - it doesn't have the same professional interface of the Franklin. The dictionary is from the American Heritage Dictionary and the listing of words looks cheap somehow whereas the Franklin had the entire Al-Mawrid dictionary in it which is a highly respected Arabic/English dictionary. At Tahrir Square the asking price is $300US which seems quite consistent with the net prices I just looked up.

At the moment my choice as a dictionary replacement is the Al-Mawrid Bookman BAS-1875

http://www.tcc-qatar.com/almawrid-BAS-1875.htm

but unfortunately the $299US price tag + postage is a stretch on my meagre budget. There's also the Ectaco EA800 but the price on it is $500 and the word count is only 670,000 words