Currently using an F109 to do this, but the screen is rather small and strains the eye.

Does anyone know of a weblink that can recognise a handwritten character input (even if slightly wrong) and make a "best guess" choice followed by translation?

At present the dictionaries I've seen all require pinyin or a type-written character. Not much help when unable to guess the pinyin.

n词库: http://www.nciku.com

The best one that I've come across is probably plecodict, but that's pretty pricey, and is only for mobile platforms. On the web, I'd recommend MDBG (with whom we are partnered!). Just go to http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php and click on the little brush icon next to the search field and draw the character.

The one thing to remember is that the character lookup isn't perfect and stroke order is really important. Literally, misplace one stroke and it may be unable to detect what you're trying to write so pay close attention to the stroke order.

Wenlin is great at handwriting recognition (even when you get the stroke order wrong, but you do have to set it to ignore stroke order). It's not web-based but you can probably download it. I don't know how much it costs, though.

Re George's comment "The one thing to remember is that the character lookup isn't perfect and stroke order is really important": this is the advantage of nciku's tool, it's much better at figuring out which character you mean even if the stroke order is incorrect.

I have Wenlin (cost around £100 in the UK when I bought it - $200 at the tine) but sometimes I fail to get it to figure what I am trying to write and nciku usually sorts it for me - very good character recognition, if a little slow.

I use this tool a lot:
http://www.mandarintools.com/dimsum.html

It also has hand-writing recognition although it does not work all that great. Stroke order is very important.

@Kevin, good point, I've actually never used Nciku before for character lookup, I guess I should give it a try. The MDBG lookup is very sensitive to stroke order, sometimes maddeningly so!