The new Palm Treo Pro could be the best device for people who need Chinese and English friendly operation of SMS and Email, and an amazing Chinese <-> English and Chinese <-> Chinese dictionary too.

The Treo Pro will start shipping in September for $550 for Unlocked GSM + Wifi + GPS + 400 MHz CPU + Good Battery + 2MP Camera

Additionally, Opera Mobile for Windows Mobile is supposed to be as good or better than Safari on the iPhone, so with EDGE, 3G and WiFi, this would be a great alternative to the iPhone. Additionally, the Treo Pro is smaller than the iPhone!

Dictionary: Pleco Dict including the 现代汉语规范词典 for Chinese <-> Chinese and the 21世纪大英汉词典 for 280,000 including proper nouns like cities, countries and even 16 Simpson’s TV show guest stars! It’s a very useful $99 upgrade on top of the standard package, or about $200 in total if you’ve never purchased an earlier Pleco version.

Input-method-wise, CE-Star (http://www.mobem.com/) has a built in handwriting recognizer and decent Pinyin input but costs a lot of money ($43.50), but there’s a keyboard-only one called ZTA4 (http://www.ztqj.com/) that’s free and actually really nice – has a slick interface and it does a very good job with intelligently guessing what you’re trying to type. It doesn’t enable Chinese support on English-language phones, though, while CE-Star does.

Of course, Windows Mobile also runs Skype and MSN Messenger

Just need to make sure I can load the Chinese language version of Windows Mobile 6.1 on the Treo Pro and we’re in good shape!