I received my 860 yesterday from
www.japan-direct.com. It was I think $698 + $35 s&H. It was clearly marked as a PDA on the packaging but customs didn\'t assess any duty. It took one week to arrive, partly due to the Memorial-day weekend. I did the Japanese-English conversion myself working from the Word doc Japan Direct includes in the confirmation email. The bootstrapping to get the terminal installed was the trickiest part since I couldn\'t easily tell which app was the application installer. I solved that problem by putting it on an SD card via my 5600, double-clicked it an voila! The installer launched. From there everything else was cake, though I did have to go into \"Tab Setting\" to get the icon to show up under Applications.
I\'ve been using a 5600 for about a year now. Wow what a difference! I\'m really pleased with the improvements in the case finish and the addition of the rubberized offsets. The bezel around my 5600 has some slight scratching around the edges due to the flipscreen pushing down on it. The new screen is fantastic! The larger viewable area makes working on the Z even easier than it was -- the pixel density really imrpoves the readability. But for the lack of integrated 802.11 it would be the perfect handheld for me. I\'m not complaining though. My Ambicom works wonderfully -- just took it out of the 5600 and plugged it in with no problems or special config needed.
I somewhat like the Netfront browser but will probably go back to Opera 7. The tabs in Netfront are great (though I haven\'t figured out how to close them yet) but Opera has that fantastic single-column reading mode. Opera also has great key equivalents that make it easier to control from the keyboard. I thought I would miss the 5600\'s portrait keyboard when it came to browsing since you can click the spacebar to scroll. Then I found the jog dial. What a fantastic addition! I can read very easily now with one hand. The jog dial also solves the problem of scrolling one-handed in apps that don\'t use keyboard scrolling.
This is a small thing but I really like the minimal packaging the 860 comes in. The 5600 needed more due to the dock but still seems excessive. I was intrigued by the small box from Japan Direct at first, wondering whether they had sent only the Z. No -- just a svelte product in a tasteful small box.
I want to try the Cacko Qtopia ROM before PDAXRom but have a couple of questions. As far as I can tell there\'s no reason why it shouldn\'t work in the 860. Am I right? Do I still need to repartion the memory? I\'ve noticed most people\'s signatures show them running 1.21a -- I haven\'t seen any 1.21b notes. Is the \"b\" hotfix not that important?
Thanks,
Aaron
