Ectaco iTravl NTL-9C Talking 2-Way Multilingual Communicator & Electronic Dictionary Black

sent it back

I purchased one of these after carefully researching similar devices on the internet. I have found that the speech aspect is not nearly as effective as they advertise it to be. The dictionary is more limited than I expected as well. My main complaint however is that the internal battery charging system is very poor. I wanted to use this over the weekend so I plugged in the charger for the specified time. When I turned on the device I received a warning that my battery power was extremely low and that I needed to charge the device. I then used the 12 volt charging adaptor for the car, the charging light came on for several seconds and then went out and only briefly lit up when I plugged the charger in (several times) again. It would not continue to charge. When I tried the device I received the same low power warning. I then changed batteries and the charger worked on the newly installed battery and the device showed almost full power. I continued charging that battery and then swapped batteries so I had the original supposedly uncharged battery back in it. That battery now showed almost 100% power. What is up? I had this problem when I first bought the unit and the company would have let me exchange batteries, but oviously the problem is with the unit, not the battery. The problem seemed to have gone away after just removing and replacing the battery.Bottom line, don't buy this thing, it is harder to use that we are led to believe and, at least in my case, the charging/battery connection is faulty.

I ordered one of these things elsewhere and my heart sank when i saw the reviews here! I think some people are expecting a magic box or something more SI-FI. The reality is that this thing is very helpful for communicating with other people. Sure, hiring a person to translator for you would be faster and more accurate but it also costs 10x as much and wont teach you anything.I want to be as simple as possible, i have used this in 3 different countries and i found it very useful. Dare i say it even saved my life in Russia! If you read the description and know what the product actually does beforehand you wont be disappointed. Do your research people!

Well, first they advertised $550 for this "incredible" piece of equipment, so I waited till after Christmas, and got it for $350, thinking, I was getting a deal. Was I ever wrong. First, it comes with a dead battery (they don't give you any troubleshooting information at all!), and I couldn't get it to function properly; alot of error statements and crashing. So, the only option I had was to let the battery charge and see if this was the problem. Yes, and again, no troubleshooting help in the manual. It took me hours to get this thing working properly. The processor is very archaic. I have an HP programmable calculator that is 22 years old, with the same processing power. And when you factor in inflation over 22 years, I actually paid less for my HP than this translator!So, I'm overseas, and about to board my flight into the country of my destination and I use the translator to communicate with my first citizen, and the fully charged battery dies within 30 minutes. Now I'm concerned, because I don't speak the language, and I still have to go through customs! When the battery level shows 3/4 charge, it's dead. Then they started sending me emails to trade in my translator for a new one at $800. I was offended.Finally, they sent me an e-mail to download and update my sd card. I'm thinking maybe they they have worked out some bugs and this would improve it. But I also decide to save all of the old data just in case (they don't tell you to do this). And after a 3.5 hr download and install, it crashes my translator to the point that it would't even come on. I formated the sd card and reloaded the old data and it started working again.The idea of this translator is great, but, there isn't one sophisticated component on it; and it will take another company to perfect the idea.

The battery life has been about about 15 minutes. The pronunciation feature is inaccurate; it told my native-speaker Spanish professor that her pronunciation needed practice. She was not amused. It is very slow to translate; try having a conversation when it takes 15 seconds to translate a four word sentence. I do not trust the translations; due to the puzzled response of the other party; also when it translates from English to another language and then back to English as a test, the result is often gibberish. You'll be better off with phrase books and dictionaries.

I gotta say, I REALLY like this unit. It's awesome how it speaks to you and translates it both ways. And its handheld so I have no troubles taking it everywhere with me when I travel. I go on away business a lot and device is the only thing that gets me through! It really helps me to communicate with all the locals. Best money I ever spent!

Ectaco, Total JUNK and falsely advertised, extreemly rude company,A complete waist of money.This junk device makes you select a catagory to phrases before you can speak.Every time you want to speak, you must first select a catagory. It will piss you off immediately.I called to return and got the run-a-round, and they refused to accept their junk for return.I waisted $472.00, and hope you the reader take special note to this review.Iphone and Ipad apps are FREE with excellent voice recognition.

unit has features not needed, such as the travel video clip and the on screen keyboard can be hard to use when in a moving vehicle. To play MP3 audio an optional unit must be purchased.