Re: [tlug] Some advices for Zaurus

[Alain Hoang <hoanga@example.com>]

Hello Zuco,

Zuco Pietro wrote:

>Hello Tlugers.
>
>I'm about to take a Sharp Zaurus SL-C1000 with a wireless card GW-CF11X.
>  
>
    Take?  As in buy?   As in receive from a friend? Take the store 
display and put it in your pocket?
I'm going to assume you're about to purchase one rather than the last 
option as that is highly
unrecommended   :)

>Some opinions, warnings or recommendations before take it?
>
>At recent post in TLUG the people seems to be satisfied with it, but I
>would like to know if some one have a bad experience or a
>recommendation about a negative point of Sharp Zaurus devices.
>  
>
    I don't have the C1000 but did buy the 760 a few years ago.  So
far I've been rather satisfied with it but I'm definitely not very 
satisfied with it.  It really
depends on what your purpose for it is.  I didn't have a very highly 
defined purpose when
I bought mine so that might have led to some of my disappointments.  The 
C3000 (?)
has some subway navigation software and personally I'd find that really 
useful to have
if it works offline (very handy when trying to get to point B from point 
A and you're
somewhere in point C where C != A or B).
    The Open Source projects such as OpenZaurus, OPIE, and GPE have been 
interesting
at a glance at but they all seem to completely subsume the Zaurus 
without regards to
compatibility or really describing how to use the base applications. ( I 
could be very
wrong on this but last I checked it certainly seemed like a one-way 
operation).
And most of the seemed a little lacking in some of the functionality I 
expected from
the Sharp base ROM.

Here's some of my personal pros and cons.
Pros
----
1. JE - EJ Japanese dictionary with handwriting recognition support built-in
2. ~5 hr battery life which lets it work for the long haul
3. CF & SD slots are really handy for adding extra storage capacity
4. Mini web browser and text readers handy for offline reading
5. The scribble pad makes a very good notepad when you're out of paper

Cons
------
1. Keyboard input is an order of magnitude slower for input for me.. 
perhaps
   two?  It makes using traditional CLI crawling a little frustrating for me
2. Tons of free software available but it seems a headache to try to figure
    out what runs with which version of Zaurus ROM.
3. (perhaps the 760 only) the version of Qpdf I found only does 320x200.
    Blech too slow.  Does the 860 and later versions have a better PDF
    reader?
4. Default ROM doens't play that nice with Open Source

Cheers,
Alain