Zaurus:_first_impressions

title: Zaurus: First Impressions date: 2006-01-22 09:19:45

The Sharp Zaurus has arrived, and so far I'm pretty happy with it. It's a handheld, it runs Linux, it's nice. Handwriting recognition is pretty good with this -- better than I remember a Handspring (last handheld I tried, maybe two years ago) being. The keyboard is decent, but it doesn't take long before I can feel my thumbs start to seize up, and anyway there's not always a way to do something without tapping somewhere on the screen.

The software, however...hm. It came with the stock Sharp distro and apps, so I tried using that at first. They were pretty good -- calendar worked, to-do list worked -- but things were all separate from each other. A todo item might have a due date, but it wouldn't be added to the calendar. A calendar item can't include a link to contact information. All this means a lot of re-entering stuff, which is a pain in the ass.

But hey, beauty of open source, right? So I tried Opie, the QT-based OpenZaurus distro. I had some problems installing because I missed part of the instructions (when it says rename the file initrd.bin, don't rename it initrd), but once it came up things seemed good. You still can't have a todo item show up in your calendar, but there's a decent workaround: an app called "Today" that shows you what's coming up in your calendar and your todo list. Perfect!

Except for suspend: it doesn't always come back from the dead, at which point you need to flip a tiny switch on the back of the thing and reboot. (This is a known problem, and a kernel upgrade is supposed to make it better.)

So fine, beauty of open source, right? I tried GPE, the GTK-based OpenZaurus distro, and am even more annoyed with it. Suspend seems to work better, but the handwriting recognition software is different from stock/Opie, so I have to relearn strokes. Plus, there's no separate area for capital (as opposed to lower-case) letters, which I've come to find pretty damned handy. That's enough to push me back to Opie, and try the kernel upgrade.