[luau] Sharp Zaurus sl5000d

[Jeff Mings]

This could be a very cool thing, depending on what you need and want in 
a PDA.  I have been coveting the new Zaurus with the pop-down keyboard, 
beautiful big screen, and real, built-in Linux.  The potential to easily 
move stuff between my Linux boxen and PDA is very appealing, and not 
really possible with my 5th and current PDA, a Compaq Ipaq.  The Ipaq 
was purchased by my former boss for me so that I could 
setup/manage/tailor his Ipaq.  This may sound silly, but setting up the 
various connectoids, email profiles and various other settings on a 
miniature version of Windoze is much more complex and needlessly 
complicated than the same actions on a PalmOS device.  Needless to say, 
I don't like WinCE, and have wanted to buy a Zaurus, but the price of a 
new unit is too high, so I decided to buy a snap-on keyboard that is 
functionally similar to the Zaurus' and to load one of the Ipaq Linux 
distros.  I will lose the very useful pocket street maps, but I'll gain 
much more.  I think the retail price is usually $500 for the Zaurus.  It 
sounds like a great deal to me for a mini linux-box-in-your-pocket.  If 
you're just looking for an electronic organizer, though, go buy a 
handspring.

-Jeff


whenever wrote:

>      I got  my hand on a zaurus from a friend today, it's running Linux with 
>QT, pretty good PDA, too bad the sync software that came with the unit is 
>windows based,  I got to download the linux hot sync program, but too lazy to 
>recompile the kernel for usb-ppp support.  There are some software out there 
>for it, free sdk, gcc cross compiler and some pre-compiled binaries.   He's 
>willing to sell me the unit for $275, what do you guys think?  Oh, it also 
>has 32mb SD memory added on, the unit based on ARM 206Mhz, can do mpeg-1 and 
>mp3, 64k TFT color screen, take CompactFlash and SD.
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