Japanese Character Entry on an English PDA
As I mentioned a bit earlier, my new PDA couldn't do Japanese handwriting recognition because Decuma's superb kanji recognition software does not play well with Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition. I've now solved the problem. While probably not useful to 99.9% of my readers, I wanted to put the solution here for future tinkerers. (The title of this entry is dull, yes, but it's meant for Google more than anyone else.)
Basically, I installed Monster Chinese. It eats up a ton of memory and the user interface isn't a patch on Decuma's system, but on the other hand, it works.
You'll have to install three programs. First, you'll need the basic Monster.net application. Then you'll need the Japanese entry system. You'll also need the Chinese character entry system. And if you speak Japanese, the problem will be that the instructions (and the interface screens) are mostly in Chinese. But at the end of the day, it mostly works.
I say mostly, because there's a couple of differences between Japanese and Chinese characters, and every so often I was to look something up in my dictionary that I just can't manage. But until Decuma starts supporting the new OS, this is a good interim solution.