This little translator is just what I was looking for for my trip to Italy. It's compact, light, and full of features. Having an alarm clock is expected, but still nice. The ability to play mp3s is a nice bonus as well. The translation was solid, and it was very easy to use even for older people who had never seen a device like this. The only reason I don't give it a full five stars is because it didn't have a full word to word translation. Some abstract words and concepts were present only within a sentence. Overall, though, excellent bargain.

Overall is nice compact translator however the screen is very hard to read. They should have made the font display much larger.

I recently purchased & returned other speaking translators (voice phrase books / talking dictionaries) from other companies (other brands). This Franklin model is by far the best: clear, natural, speaking voice, vs. a computer-generated "robot voice", with others. My only criticism is that the speaking voice is too fast. At least it can be repeated as often as necessary.

The translation and language portion of this product work fine. The problem is in the visibility of the screen. In the days when we can use a cell phone as a flashlight, this screen is very difficult to view even in good light. It's like going back to the early days of portable devices.
I have some problems with the user interface, things like a next and previous button to return to a search you want to modify. But overall, you can find what you're looking for fairly easily.

Perhaps I received a dud, but the backlight stopped working literally after about 8 uses, making the poorly contrasted screen nearly impossible to see unless you're directly under a lamp or in a very brightly lit area.

Also, while it works just fine as a "word-to-word" translator, it's too hard and cumbersome to look up sentenses and phrases quickly, and you can't enter your own.

The speaking voice is however, better than other translators that I've seen, but they do tend to speak the phrases (when you find them) too quickly so they sound blended together. The purpose of one of these things is so we can LEARN a new language, so they should speak more slowly, not as quickly as a native speaker of that language can speak. duh. The Spanish voice and Chinese voices are the clearest. The Japanese and Russian voices sound muffled and are hard to make out.

If this were under $100 I'd say it's fine for what it is. With an average retail price of $200 however, it's got too many flaws to recommend it.