OESF Portables Forum
General Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: JimR on July 12, 2008, 10:20:49 am
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Hi There. My name's Jim, I live in Japan. I'm new around, I was wondering if you all could help.
I'm looking for a PDA that allows for a good range of document-handling (editing, viewing of text, spreadsheets, etc.) and video. I need something with bilingual Japanese/English capability. Looking at the Zaurus specs, it seems perfect (and oh so pretty!). My question is, since the Z was discontinued, has there been an affordable replacement?
(I would love to get a nice tablet PC, but I don't have $1500 to spend on one.)
Failing that, is the Zaurus C1000 the thing I'm looking for? Like I said, I mostly need document handling (and a good Japanese dictionary is a plus), though audio/video capability are a plus. And, I think I saw someone mention emulators?
I know it doesn't have an onboard HD. Is that a problem?
I can get one here in Japan for about 34,000yen ($320 US); would you recommend it?
Thanks!
Jim
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I have heard that Sharp/Cacko distros have great Japanese dictionaries, but haven't actually seen this for myself (I ditched them long ago).
Spreadsheets and documents are easy (under Debian you can even get OpenOffice, but it's insanely slow).
Audio is no problem (especially thanks to Quasar), video can be if you want to play them at 640x480 (you'll need to overclock for that). I have found that if you encode videos at 320x240 you get decent quality and it plays well (I just change the screen resolution to 320x240 while playing it to not have the actual scaling overhead, I believe Cacko can do that).
As for emulators, here's what I know of:
-PS1 (a little slow, maybe need to compile from source that won't build for me)
-GB/GBC/GBA
-NES/SNES
What I believe are available:
-Commodore 64
-Atari
-Spectrum
-More
The onboard can be a big deal. If you stay with the Cacko/Shard distros, you're limited to 4 GB SD (NOT SDHC) cards. With other distros you can use larger. You can also use any size of CF card, but then you can't have wilreless at the same time.
In short, get one with an internal drive if you want lots of storage without worrying about getting a big SD[HC] card. Otherwise, the Cx000* and C1000 Zaurii are the same.
No, nothing has replaced the Z, especially not if you want the Japanese stuff.
And asking if you want a Zaurus here is not going to get you an unbiased answer...Everybody will likely say yes (myself included).
If you want more of a mini laptop (ie, X11), I believe Meanie had some details on how to make pdaXrom Japanese. You'll have to figure that out on your own, though, as I have no experience with it.
Hope that helps.
*C3000 doesn't have much flash memory, which makes some distributions not work on it, so that model is NOT the same, FWIW.
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Thanks Cap'n.
I appreciate your comments. I knew I was asking a biased crowd here, but as the Zaurus has been down for over a year now, I was wondering if you all had any new machines. I guess not!
The more I look at this machine, the more excited I get.
I just have to convince my wife that I really neeeeed another shiny new gadget.
One last question--is there a kind of FAQ or guide to the different distros available, and their relative merits? I know there is all kinds of info here, but it's kind of scattered, and I was wondering if there was a centralized comparison/info resource.
Thanks again!
Jim
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If you click on the OESF link at the top of the forums it will take you to our wiki. You should be able to get a rough idea of the various features of the roms/distros for the Z. Of course searching the forums should also help: but this is sometimes frustrating and always seems to take a lot of time.
Good luck!
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Hi,
You can run zbedic and use my conversion of EDICT. So, if you want to try out this dictionary you can just go to WWWJDIC website and see for yourself without even buying a Zaurus.
Is Zaurus discontinued ? It may be difficult to find but I think if you look in the larger stores of BIC Camera or Yodobashi Camera you will be able to find it.
You can get a 3200 for Y40,000 so in terms of value I would say go for the 3200.
koan
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There was a relatively recent post on peoples' impressions of distros. Search for it (I just started using Dvorak, so this is taking forever to type).
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Go for the C-3200, and while you are learning and choicing your main distro, the regular Sharp Rom is a great, and stable, starting point.
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Hi, thanks again for all the replies. I'll look around at the info.
Koan--You ported WWWJDIC onto the zaurus? That's awesome! I use that all the time.
I'll look into C-3200 availability.
Thanks again!!!