Convince Me...please..., Need advice about future purchases Options

[TsingTao]

(Watch it...I'm loooooooooooooooong winded...)


Hello all,

I'm gonna be moving to Japan in the fall (should have been this summer...stupid economy!) and be living there for a year while I go to school to learn Japanese. Thus I'm both buying a bunch of stuff and selling a bunch of stuff. Since I love my family and friends a whole lot, I want to keep in contact with them while I'm away. And since I am planning on a fair amount of intra-Nihon travel, mobile communication is a must. Though I plan on purchasing a sick-ultra-techno-cool-only-in-Japan-cell-phone while I'm there, having emailed via phones before I think I'll be needing something with erm...1 letter per key...

Thus far I have settled on an HP Jornada 720. It has an *almost* touch-typeable keyboard, a big screen and a built in modem. Also a PCMCIA slot that allows me to use an excellent Enterasys wifi card, yielding all 14 Japanese wifi channels and Ministumbler (wifi detection agent). It also plays movies and MP3's reasonably well. The downside of it of course is that it's pretty big compared to most PDA's. It's not really 'pocketable'.

Of course, I was tantilized by the release of the SL-C3000 and it's luscious 4gb internal HDD. But the $800 price tag made it an impossible dream.

Enter the SL-C1000.

At $500 it's almost doable. I already have a D-Link Air 660W CF wifi card (that works with Kismet by the way) and a 1GB CF card for movies (I also have the odd 256mb SD card lying around). It seems to me all I would need aditionally is a CF modem and the C1000 looks to be the equivilant or superior to the Jornada in almost every way. Couple things I'm wondering about though that I'm hoping those with experience with the C1000 (I have a SL-5500, so I'm not totally unfamiliar with the Zaurus line) can share.

- Battery Life: I've never seen a company acurately represent the battery life of any of their products. How much time should I expect watching movies, playing MP3's, or surfing the web ? Also, I know wn extra long life battery is available in Japan, but it looks like it hangs out of the chasis somehow. Any experience with it ?

- Movie Playback: The SL-5500 is a little grainy and a little jerky, but not so much that I wouldn't be willing to watch an entire film on it. I would expect that with a better screen and a faster processor the C1000 is significantly better...and at the very least watchable. Any comments on movie playback on the C1000 ? Mpeg ? AVI ?

- OS: I forget when, but I know the basic underlying linux distro for the Zaurus line changed at some point. I believe it's 'Lineo' now whereas it was something else back in the SL-5500 days. I also considered the G.Mate Yopy 3700 as an alternative to the Jornada. Many of the user reviews for it said that it operated faster than a C850 despite having a slower processor. These comments pointed to the Debian based OS of the Yopy as being more efficient, thus dilivering better performance. Has the OS improved with the C1000 and C3000 ?

- Kismet: I spent a fair amount of time getting Ministumbler to work on my Jornada so I can take advantage of the prolific unsecured wireless in Japan. I would just like to make sure that Kismet works on the C1000. Does it ?

- C1000 or ?: I've also mused about perhaps purchasing a C850 instead. Any compelling reason to go with the C1000 over the (cheaper now) C850 ?


That's about it all I can thing of now. Anyway, thanks for reading this far, and if you have any information you'd like to contribute I'd appreciate it.

Thanks!

[chromodoris]

If you plan to do a fair bit of travelling, you may be better off going for a PHS cellular modem (they're quite cool actually, and don't stick out half as much as your typical WiFi card). I get the feeling that you're not going to have much luck with your netstumbler.

C1000 vs 850 - 4G HDD & faster CPU, but more softwares are tested for the 850, (I think) including a few alternative ROMs... because of the HDD, the C1000 is prone to pauses also while it waits for the HDD.