Matthew Allum ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > on Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 01:49:12AM +0000, Adam Spiers wrote: > > Finally! Don't suppose anyone bought a C700 yet? Am very tempted ... > > I have one, ;-) .
Ooooh :-) > If you want one, dont bother with dynamism, try shop.conics.net - they > are ~500$ there. It takes a couple of minutes to turn one ( mostly ) > English, you just change the system locale to C. I had read that, but got the impression that dynamism had hired David Solomon (calls himself LordDavon on the web forums) to do some real work on making the apps work better under English or some such improvement, but could never find out exactly what the changes were. This is the most info I could find: http://www.nvmax.com/cgi-bin/community.pl?num=1040534208 >From the low visibility of this project, I sort of wonder whether any progress is still being made. Would you say it's a waste of time worrying about these improvements? > Fortunatly its not too much trouble to reflash the machine ( > OpenZaurus buildroot has basic support ) and then get a real windowing > system running on it :-). > > See http://handhelds.org/~mallum/c700/ , for some unfortunately slightly > blurred shots. > > Apart from not-so-great but bearable battery life and only 32Mb of > Ram, the machine is truly amazing. The screen has to be seen to be > believed, it must be approx 200dpi . > > The machine has alot of flash ( 64Mb ) so it'd be no problem to fit a > full Perl on there. Sounds glorious. Aaargh. I'm still wondering whether I did the right thing by opting for converging PDA and phone into one - I just effectively upgraded my T68/Palm Vx combo to an all-in-one P800, with mixed feelings. Executive summary: the P800 hardware is very good except for the limited memory expansion (64MB duo card tops), predictably low battery life and crappy camera, but the software, from the perspective of a spoilt Palm fan, is pretty damn crappy really. Even the version of Opera, which is very nippy and renders beautifully, is missing some really basic features, e.g. editing and deleting of bookmarks (!) and forcing browsing in an offline mode. The question that bothers me is: how long will it take for SE to produce a firmware revision with a more usable version of UIQ, and how long before there are some decent PIM apps on there? To that end, I'd be very interested to hear how usable the C700 is as a standard PDA with quality PIMs. For me it is essential that any such device has a real "whip it out of your pocket, enter an appointment or todo or note, and put it back" factor; the superb hack value that the Zaurus obviously has (Perl on a PDA!) is just the very pleasant icing on the cake, and unfortunately I don't have really time to contribute to the coding of said PIMs. Random questions I'd be extremely interested to hear answers too: - How have you found the usability of the PIMs, and the device as a PDA (as opposed to hacking toy) in general? - How's mobile internet? Doable over IR and Bluetooth? How well does konqueror work? - Can you run the Hancom stuff with OpenZaurus? - How many of the apps written for the SL-5500 Just Work(TM) with the C700? - How many of the apps will work landscape /and/ portrait? - How quick and convenient is it to flip over to portrait? - Am I better off with the newly-arrived SL-5600? (Only advantage I can see is the huge 1700mAh battery) I'll happily buy pints for you or anyone who can answer these questions and/or give me a demo before I cave in to temptation and order one anyway ;-)
