Interested in 760, but some questions first. Options

a big thing i want with any PDA i purchase, is multimedia.
Video to be exact. how well can the 750/760 handle mpeg2/4/divx?

Also i've heard the screen is not transflective? while other reviews say its the best screen they have ever seen. is it backlight? or reflective only.

and is it capable of running all linux programs (considering recompilation to the x-scale?)

there isnt much documentation on this thing out there.
and too bad it doesnt have USB host, bluetooth, and WiFi. but as of yet, this seems to be the best PDA on the market, even if its not avialable in th USA.

Do you think i should wait until next year to purchase a PDA, and hopefully more like this will have hit USA markets with the forementioned features? or do you think this PDA line will die out like so many other products (mainly because of its high price)

[ScottYelich]

I'm not that into media... so I can't really help with the vid -- but I see plenty of posts from
others who seem to have had success in that area.

As far as the screen is concerned -- the screen is not the best screen if you are in sunlight.
Even shading the device a little, if there is ample sunlight, doesn't seem to help.

However, indoors and out of (direct) sunlight, the screen is definitely the best screen on
a PDA/Device that I have (ever) seen.

I may not be looking close enough -- but I haven't seemed to either have had or noticed
any dead pixels on my 700 or 760. Yes, my 760 has a buz in the lower left of the screen,
but it seems that they all have this, so perhaps that is just normal.

The device doesn't have the best speaker (uh, buzzer?), but with a headset plugged in,
that doesn't really matter.

Scott

[jgraves]

Guest,

I just received my 760 this week. I previously had a palm 505. The
screen is much much much better than the 505. I held it next to
a friends new T3 and it was about the same clarity. But, when we
ran apps, mine was much better (the resolution is super).

As far as multi-media, I've been playing around with mencoder to get
tv programs to look good on the device. My goal is to reduce the file
size and not so much the image quality. So, from that aspect, I don't really
take advantage of the full 640x480.

Photos are another story. When I view photos I take from my camera
(Also compact flash) and display them, they look SUPER! It is great
to take some photos, then have a slideshow shortly after. (And, I don't
use up my valuable camera batteries.

The only thing I can say bad about the 760, like others have said: the base
software is not that good. There are lots of pd software you can use,
but you may need to get "down and dirty" sometimes.

Good luck.

-John

thanks scott, john. but i still have some questions unanswered.
can i easily port other linux apps to the zaurus?
and not being able to see the screen outside is kindof a downer.
and for the video, is it possible to play something at 640x480 without any skipped frames? can the xscale really handle that much?

[tumnus]

I don't have a C7x0 (Wish I had a C760 though), but people have reported excellent playback this this app:
http://www.killefiz.de/zaurus/showdetail.php?app=1310
It makes full use of the ATI graphics chip in the C7x0, although from the sounds of the description 640x480 may be a bit too much, but you can still play 320x240 videos in full screen mode.

As for porting Linux apps, it all depends on the app. Most command line apps should be trivial to port. In fact the ARM distro of Debian has most apps compiled and work on the Zaurus without any changes. With graphical apps, it all depends on the widget/object library they use. The Zaurus uses QT Embedded, which is mostly the same as QT2 on the desktop. All KDE apps use QT, but KDE3 now uses QT3, which is a little harder to port. KDE2 apps however tend to be relatively straight forward to port. If you want to use straight X apps, then you would have to install X Windows on your Zaurus.

HTH

ahh, good. i was more interested in console apps and just a few KDE apps.
But about the hardware. i hear stuff about the 6000 series, built in wifi, ect. but is the resolution just as high?
no new news on it as far as i have seen.

disregard that last post, i found out what everyone meant with the devnet forums. they talked about a 900 model supposively to be released in the US?

[ScottYelich]

what porting? this is linux... if it's not an X app... just command line, there really shouldn't be a problem.

I needed a static gnutar (to install zdebian, as the one on pocketworkstation had some dyn-lib (so) mismatch). I hopped on the ipaq cluster (running familiar) ... wget gnutar, gzip | tar, configure, make, etc. brought it over to the 760 and it ran just fine.

take a look at www.pocketworkstation.com for zdebian. I have that on my 760 (m54.spy.org) -- that's pretty decent linux on the puppy.

I also have pyqt for qtopia(opie?) based pda code...

all in all, the 760 does what I want/need.

Scott

I encoded movies with my Archos Video Player, decrased the 800 meg file to 300 megs using Windows Media Encoder and watched solaris on the Zaurus. Worked Great and easy to do!

Michael