The whole “Do people really use their PDAs?” thing has me trying to whip my Zaurus into better shape.
I installed OpenZaurus 3.0 earlier this week. It’s become pretty decent and now supports synchronization. Most of the stock apps have been substantially upgraded, though they still compare poorly against Palm OS and Pocket PC equivalents.
Archive for November, 2002
Playing with my Zaurus
30Nov02I purchased a Zaurus hoping that it’s built-in keyboard would address my biggest PDA complaint: lousy data entry. The keyboard is a big help, but four things hold me back from heavily using my Zaurus:
Kernel memory management isn’t optimized for PDA use.
Poor synchronization of user data to protect against system failure or loss.
No synchronization with […]
My first PDA was a PalmPilot Personal, one of the first units to have 3COM silk-screened on the front. I’d have rather purchased a Newton OS 2.0 device, but at the time a used MP130 still cost more than a new Palm.
My story is probably similar to many of those who purchased PDAs and eventually […]
A recent Ask Slashdot pondered if people really use their PDAs:
I work in a high-tech industry and I see more people carrying their PDAs than actually using them. At the same time, I see many people actually going back to their paper planners. […] Have there been any studies on PDA turnover? I think the […]
Weird ‘net problem
26Nov02My Internet connection went down for a little while, and when it came back up, all outgoing SMTP and WWW traffic was blocked. POP / FTP / SSH / Telnet sessions were fine.
Random problem, or my ISP trying to put some transparent proxies in place ahead of the holiday traffic rush?
SL-C700 from Dynamism
25Nov02Dynamism is taking pre-orders on the SL-C700, US $699 with delivery expected in mid-December. “Each Sharp Zaurus SL-C700 purchased through Dynamism includes an English-language OS and 1-year warranty.”
Sharp SL-5600
23Nov02The Zaurus SL-B500 is coming to the US as the SL-5600. It offers a few improvements over the current SL-5500: 400MHz XScale, mono speaker and microphone, 1700mAh battery, Flash jumps to 64MB and is user-accessible, RAM is reduced to 32MB.
The RAM reduction sounds bad but in terms of usable memory there is no change for […]
Sharp SL-C700 Coming to America
23Nov02Dynamism informs me that they will announce imports of the SL-C700 next week.
Unix-ish folks are already ga-ga over the SL-5×00, which is little more than a toy for sysadmin duties. It can do some neat things thanks to Linux, but trying to decipher an ls -la or a log file on a 240-pixel screen is […]
