Cherry Picks 2008: Franklin Electronic Publishers Triple Pick

The only triple pick in Cherry Picks this year came from Franklin Electronic Publishers and their Speaking Merriam-Webster Collegiat Dictionary 11th Edition, Merriam-Webster Crossword Puzzle Dictionary and the Speaking Spelling Bee.

The special thing about the new Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary is that it's a speaking dictionary. It's intended to help those who want to demonstrate a superior language skill and is an all-in-one handheld electronic reference tool. This dictionary can display and speak aloud the concise definitions of 400,000+ terms. It's also works as a thesaurus with over 500,000 synonyms and antonyms. It works with Franklin's phonetic spell correction and offers anyone hope for improved spelling. This device will build a grammar guide with quizzes, word games and lists and is a 5 language translator (English, Spanish, French, German and Italian). It's also an organizer, a local/world clock, a calculator and currency/metric converter.

The Crossword Puzzle Dictionary is basically a crossword cheat. If you get stuck during your morning you crossword you can pull this out, select your category whether it's biographical/geographical/etc... It has access to more than 325,000 different "clues" to help you get through. It has a phonetic spell correction, a confusable function which will identify sound a-like words and it has a fill in the blanks function so "f?or?d? will become florida".

The Speaking Spelling Bee lets you bring the fun of a spelling bee right to the palm of your hand. It was created for kids in grades 5-8 and has three modes of game play: Competition, Practice and Game Show. It has a 7,000 word vocabulary and a 2" LCD color screen. You can also plug it up into your TV and 6 people can play at once. There are two different versions, they are very similar and come in black and white.

You can buy these three products within the month and they will cost $100, $60 and $100 respectively.