It does NOT have many important words. It is weaker than a printed dictionary.

I bought an Ectaco Partner XL-1500 at the end of November 2006, mainly for educational purposes. I ordered it online, on the ectaco.ca site (which by the way, has nothing to do with Canada as you will see further in this review).
I paid ~ 205 CAD for it and I received it 4 days after I placed the order.

In a few hours of tests I found this dictionary has many problems that can prevent someone to translate correctly a word or a phrase. I sent it back immediately and in total I lost a lot of money (~ CAD 52). But let me first write about the problems this device has:

(*) Missing MANY important words: Examples:
- From French (translating from French to English):
- "es"; "est"; "sommes"; "etes"; "sont"; which are the respective equivalents for these English words:
(you) are, (he/she) is, (we/you/they) are .

- I tried randomly other French verbs and the conclusion was that ECTACO Partner XL-1500 cannot translate any conjugated verb from French to English.

- From Italian (translating from Italian to English):
- The same problem with the conjugation of verbs. E.g.:
"facciamo" is not found. (in English it means "(we) do" ).

- Other examples of missing words:
- capi (in English: heads)
- cose (in English: things)
These are plural forms of Italian nouns, and if you don't know the singular forms you can't find their meaning. The entries resulted from the automatic search are:
"capiente" when you enter "capi", and
"cosecante" when you enter "cose" . Both results are useless.

- English: "cannot"; "can't"; "gesundheit"; "juggernaut"; "ignescent" All these words are missing and who knows how many others. I simply chose them randomly from a small printed English dictionary Harper Collins (2004) (40000 words) and then I didn't find them in Ectaco Partner XL-1500.

The big question is what and where are those over 3.3 million words of this dictionary? That would mean approximately 220 thousands words for each language. How come important words, like declined nouns or conjugated verbs are missing from ECTACO Partner XL-1500? They are not
missing from the simplest printed dictionaries!

I took for example the printed Harper Collins English-French-English dictionary (2000, 2nd Ed.) which has only 40000 entries in total (that would be about only 20000 entries for each language) and it does not have those problems I mentioned above!

(*) Incorrect pronunciation:

For example "bonjour" in French. On ECTACO Partner XL-1500 it sounds like "bon-joo-Ere" instead of "bon-joor".

Another word I tried: "par" sounds somewhere between "bar" and "mare". The initial "p" is very confusing.

For the Portuguese "obrigado" is the other way, the "b" sounds like "p". The whole word sounds like "oprigadoo" instead of a correct "obrigadoo".

The English pronunciation for "Thank you" is a disaster:
it sounds like "Faek(l)iu" or "Faek(r)iu". The sound for the "n" is not generated. Also there is an extra sound generated between "Thank" and "you", something like "l" or "r".

(*) Limited length of the entered words:
You cannot enter words or phrases that have more than 16 characters. That's a big problem for German and also a big problem if you want to construct and hear a normal proposition in any other language.
There is no specification on the Ectaco website or on the User Manual about that limit.

(*) The keyboard has no Character Repeat function. If you want to delete a word you have to press "BS" many times. If you want to move the cursor at any position on the input line you have to press the cursor keys many times. That's really slow and uncomfortable.

(*) There is no "clear screen" function. "Esc" can bring you back one window but you can lose the choices you have made in the working window, e.g. the languages you're working with.

(*) Confusing instructions:
- It's not clear when the System Initialization should be allowed and when not.

(*) A major feature missing is is the phonetic transcription
for other languages than English. It's not clear to what language is this device dedicated? Which one is the primary source?

- On one hand the language with the most words in this dictionary seems to be English, which indicates the English speaking people as the desired clients. But they DO NOT need the phonetic transcription for English! They need it for the other languages!!

- If English is only the destination language, and the device is focused on the other languages then how come you can't translate important words from other languages to English, as I showed above?

(*) Physical problems:

- The cover of the battery compartment cannot be closed firmly: its small hooks are too weak; so it's likely to lose that cover while traveling.

- The thin cable strap that connects the display to the rest of the device is merely exposed. Seeing it I really doubt it can last even 1 year of opening/closing this device.

Now, let's see the customer service problems:

I wrote about all the technical problems of this device in an email to the sales person that received my order, and I asked for a full refund because I considered that Ectaco Partner XL-1500's capabilities are far from what was advertised on Ectaco's site.

He confirmed that I was going to receive a full refund.
A month after that there was still no refund. I wrote him another email. I got some money back (177 CAD), but not the full refund (205 CAD). That sales person has never replied to my emails since then. I called Ectaco by phone and I spoke with another person that said I will get a full refund and she also sent me an email confirmation about the full refund. Two weeks after that she wrote to me another email that said they investigated my case an they cannot make an exception, and that in Terms and Conditions it's written
that all returned items are subject to a "restocking fee equal to 6.5% of the purchase price" and "the cost of the original shipping and handling".

So even though they advertise "Free shipping & handling within the US & Canada on any dictionary purchase", they retained 10 US dollars from the refund, as shipping cost.

In total I lost 53 dollars: CAD 28 lost from the refund, plus CAD 10 on customs fees, plus CAD 15 when I shipped the dictionary back to Ectaco.

All the operations were done in US dollars by Ectaco and converted to and fro CAD . Thus international customers may lose or gain some money because of the exchage rate.

The phone calls I made were long distance to US. Ectaco doesn't have a free toll international number (like 1-800).

Even though they pretend to be a global company, they don't have support offices outside US, so if an item gets a defect the only place a customer can send it for repairs is Ectaco's office in US. That's why I said that the Ectaco.ca site has nothing to do with Canada, other than to lure Canadian customers.

From this experience I don't think Ectaco is a serious company: they don't respect the customers since they are not able to keep the promise made to an unhappy customer. It's likely that anyone with a device got from Ectaco may have the same customer service problems that I had, if the device is faulty or unsatisfactory.