-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Craig White wrote: > can't help - not even a little bit but would appreciate your keeping us > informed of your progress on the Sharp. As requested, this is my first description of the Sharp Zaurus SL-5600 that I bought on eBay and received last Tuesday. I actually have been writing it at stolen moments over the days since then. So far, it is fun but I have not put it to full use. But, I am getting into the review. I'll put this one the web somewhere at some point but for now, it is a longish email. All comments and pointers welcome. Alan - ----------- I promised that I would document my adventures with the Zaurus SL-5600. After my second day with it is now nearly over, I figure I better get started. First off, I am writing this document, for now, on the unit using the built in keyboard. It is easier to use than I thought it would be but more on that later. Before purchase about a week ago (today is 1 Sep 2005), I checked going prices around the web. eBay prices were the lowest (Surprise.) with an average of about $170. More than half of the auctions were from the same seller (Global Phoenix Computer Technologies Solutions, Inc., http://globalpct.com). I bid on one from Global PCT, ending on the weekend, which helps sometimes to get a lower price. I closed the auction at $141.49, a pretty good deal. I should have sprung for faster shipping since it took 6 days via UPS ground from Ithica NY. My wife got tired of my daily tracking reports., The unit arrived in a plain box that held a plain white heavy cardboard box with sparse red printing with the Sharp logo and Refurbished on the side. Inside the box everything was nicely packaged as if for retail. It had a quick start book @@@ pages long. There was no CD, only a note to go to www.myzaurus.com to download software. The battery was packaged separately from the unit. Instructions required that it be fully charged before use. The power adapter plugs directly into the bottom of the unit so I quickly installed the battery and plugged it in. While charging I inspected the Zaurus. The case was very clean. Only after looking hard did I find two small scratches on the back. It looked and felt new. The main buttons slid down cleanly to expose the little keyboard. It did not feel loose or worn at all. A sticker on the back proclaims that the unit has been refurbished by Sharp. Looks like they did a good job. Once charged after about 3 hours, I turned it on. A nice logo displayed with a message to wait 2 minutes to startup. What is happening here is the kernel is booting but this only happens after power loss or a hard reset. In normal use, when the unit is off it is really suspended so this long boot time does not happen in normal use. I played with the the software for a while and was at least not repulsed. I set that aside for now. Some research showed some half dozen or so distros for the Zaurus. Some were offered as ROMs or full images of software but did not appear to offer further updates. Open Zaurus is still very active and offered a couple of desktops to choose from. I decided to stay with the original software for now but will probably go with Open Zaurus if I choose to change. http://openzaurus.org A good place to get info and links to further resources is the active Zaurus User Group. They have forums and links to other resources. http://zaurususergroup.org Moving along after deciding to stick with the built-in software, my first task was to move my data from my Palm OS based PDA to this. The only way to do this cleanly, at least using the tools from Sharp, is to sychronize your old unit to Outlook (Yes, that Out look.) and then sync Outlook to the Zaurus. A bit hard to do on a standard Linux desktop. All other user data transfer methods appear to involve user created scripts and programs, all of which had provisos about "loosing categories" or other such half solutions. I imagine the above issue resulted in many returned units when users didn't have an easy way to migrate their data and went back to the store for an upgraded Palm device instead. After playing some games with scripts and manual adjustments, most of my contacts are now in the Zaurus. I still have to migrate my calendar entries but there is supposed to be a script for that. Memos are another matter. In the Zaurus, memos are just text files as on any computer. I use jpilot as my desktop application for my Palm PDA and it only exports multiple memos to one big file. I'll have to find an Palm app that I can export multiple memos as files or invent a script to split out the big file. BTW, once the files are created, they just have to be copied to /home/zaurus/Documents/Text_Files to use them. BTW again, I pasted that path into this document by highlighting it in the bash shell and pasting it here. It's cool to do such a Linux-y operation right here in my hand. (I'm such a geek.) I cannot yet try out networking operations like email, web browsing or remote access. I don't have a CF networking card nor have I configured networking through the USB connection yet. I am anxious to try these things since it is a big part of the added capabilities of the Zaurus over my old PDA. I'll write about them when I get there. I think I'll stop here for now just so this can get published. I am impressed with the hardware, especially for the price. I have seen some software issues that may drive me to Open Zaurus sooner rather than latter, but the point there is that I *can* move to something else. I'll write more about that another time. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDGg5ZDQw/VSQuFZYRAgwGAJ95aT2OtGtcE6oBYqntJwX88s0DhgCeIQL7 GAeoYT2+2z4w/K6oeti3ZZo= =Gxyg -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change you mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss