You do get used to the stares. The best thing to do is to visit somewhere there is so unlikely to be a Westerner that they simply do not believe you are there. I found such a place walking around the gated compounds in Wuhan. Wow, I am mad!!!
The electronic translators the ladies carry are pretty good. But it seems to take forever for the lady to draw the Chinese characters on the screen. Fortunately I took my notebook computer out and we hooked into the hotel's internet access. My lady installed the thing she uses to type Chinese (it's not Pinyin, and I have no idea how it works, but it is blazingly fast).
I did actually use my phone's Chinese dictionary quite a bit - it was really useful for finding individual words of things (like the names of different fruits, and animals at the zoo).