Just got my new Sharp Zaurus in today and thought I should do a short review of it from the BRLUG Laboratory.
I bought it from TechDepot for $350 along with the Ambicom Compact Flash 802.11b card ($137). I bought the Ambicom card because it has low power consumption capabilities. I initially thought that setting up this card on the Zaurus would require some Linux driver finagaling, but I thought I would just try it before I RTFM, and hey, it worked! All I had to do was set up a TCP/IP instance, tell it to grab an IP from my DHCP server, and ba-da-ding, I'm surfing the Web while laying in bed. I'm also typing this in my Yahoo mail account. If you do want to get the Ambicom card, be warned that it does get in the way of the stylus and headphone jack. I knew this before I bought it, since I had read that the card can be surgically modified with an Exacto knife. Wish me luck. The keyboard is _very_ tiny, so it requires getting used to, but I've noticed just during the course of the email that my thumb typing has tripled since I've started. Using this keyboard is easiest when using your thumbnails to strike the keys. Typing in numbers or special characters requires holding down a function key. The key placement works well enough to get the job done. There are many nice little features to the Zaurus, such as automatically dimming the backlight when not in use for a few seconds, and this duration is configurable. Also, I originally deleted the preceding sentence, but changed my mind and undid the delete with a (function key - z) sequence. Trolltech did the GUI, and these are the same good folks who do the QT library that Opera uses. Speaking of Opera, that is included too. It has a button to resize the browser display between 5 different settings, and even the smallest setting is still readable. I just noticed a small LED that has an email icon next to the battery LED, so I'm hoping this is for email notification. That would be damn cool. The unit is pretty well built and seems sturdy, though not as sturdy as my Handspring Visor. I should probably get a case for it. It does have an opaque flip top to protect the screen. Well, I'm getting carpal thumb here and I wanna check the status of hurricane Isadore, so I'll cut this short. If you are in the market for a PDA, check out the Zaurus. It is cool as hell. I think it is very likely that we are going more PDAs running Linux in the future. John Hebert __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo! http://sbc.yahoo.com
