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Friday, October 22, 2004

Help Little Mark Buy a PDA for XMas!!!!
And best of all, it won't cost you a dime. Stalwart reader Mark is in the market for a PDA. Alice and I could advise him but he'd probably end up either buying a Blackberry (Alice loves hers) or a Sharpie pen (hey, I've had 3 PDAs, a Palm and two Mindsprings, but these days, when I jot down a note in my palm, I jot down a note in my palm).

Here's what he needs:
Urgent requirements:
1. Sharp (as in crisp, I think) display
2. Ability to read text and PDF doco with ease.

Less urgent requirements:
1. Wireless connection (not choosy about the type)
2. Decent MP3/OGG/AAC/WAV audio. (No WMAs!)

Now, Mark lives out of a small shack made from old Gateway boxes and gets his electricity free from a home-made waterwheel he fashioned from abandoned NesQuik bottles, so don't get overly extravagant with his money. However, his deceased roommate just received a $500 SSI check and he wouldn't like to spend more than that windfall amount.

Post your advice in the comments section.
# Permalink Posted at 1:18 PM 2 comments Email this Link

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http://froogle.google.com/froogle?hl=en&q=sharpie

# posted by Terry 10:46 PM

I own a Sharp (as in the company) Zaurus SL-C700 PDA, and have to recommend that family for the display alone. The screen works very poorly in direct sunlight, but it's otherwise very bright and crisp, at 640x480. I can read PDFs easily with that. (Also play mpeg4 movies at 320x240, mp3's, browse the Internet, use VNC, develop in Perl or C/C++, run Apache and MySQL, etc.)

Downsides: expensive, needs an add-on wifi card, poor battery life unless you buy an extra-large battery.

Also it runs Linux, so add-on software (like PDF viewers) is free but you kinda need to know what you're doing.

There are many places to get one of these devices, but you could try conics.net to start with. They are selling C700's used for $385, but because they're being shipped from Japan, shipping and payment transfer fees will be higher.

(ooh...after checking the site, they have that SL-C3000 for $749! *drool* Built-in 4 GB hard disk! I have a 1 GB microdrive as an add-on card and it's frustrating not being able to use the hard disk and the network card at the same time, since only one can use the CF slot. Having a built-in hard disk would make things SO MUCH nicer! One could run full-fledged Debian Linux (for ARM processors) on the thing!)

I'm no PDA expert, except on my own device, but I think a 640x480 PDA screen is difficult to get without spending a lot of money.

--Michael Spencer

# posted by Anonymous 5:39 PM

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