Personally, I look at the internal HD as a major minus.
While it does save the CF slot....a second CF slot would have made it cheaper and user replaceable when the hard drive fails.
The enitre Z is pretty much solid state (not an engineer, so I use that term loosely), and also an INTERNAL HD not puts a very finite lifetime on the unit. If my 4GB drive fails: I yank it, get another , restore and I am back in business. If I owned a 3000....well let's just remember this thing is warranteed from japan...'nough said. .
We don't know what the inside of the thing looks like yet. The unit has a large cover on the bottom, similar to the BL08 battery cover. What I would do if I were Sharp, given their off the shelf parts mentailty, is use the ability of the Processor to host 2 CF slots and put a second CF slot under that cover with with a standard CF Type II Hitachi HD. It may yet be reasonably easy to swap that drive, and it may even be possible to swap in a large capacity solid state card. (Which is what I'd be tempted to do, especially if that HD was usable in the regular CF slot on the side of the unit, for when I wanted that much storage. - MP3 or Video, which typically doesn't get done at the same time as surfing anyway)
Sharp has never listened to thier (non japanese) users...I don't recall a siingle post about the need for a built in hard drive....now I heard of built in GPS, WIFI, BT, GPRS, USB HOST, etc... but never hard drive.
Not to defend Sharp's deplorable marketing strategies any more than I absolutely have to, but why should they listen to us? We aren't Japanese, and we aren't even supposed to be able to buy the bloody thing.
As for built in connectivity, I just came back from 2 weeks in Japan, 3 days of which were spent in Akihabara, and one and a half in Osaka's Den Den Town (No. 2 in electronics districts). You know what? You'd be hard pressed to buy a CF format 802.11b card there. I saw maybe 3 stores with them, one of which carried used units, and another was in Akihabara's flea market stall area. They have PCMCIA 802.11b galore, but nothing for CF. The main reason is that anyone that uses a handheld uses one of the many flavors of cellular wireless available over there, because it is cheap, fast enough, and usable anywhere in the bloody country, not just within 50ft of a hotspot. Literally every second store carried the AirH cards. This is why I don't think we'll see anything useful, connectivity wise, in the Z any time soon.
Incidently, this is also why the built in HD makes sense. Lots of storage for your music/video, etc, and you stick your connectivity card of choice in when you want to connect.
What gets me is that it took them a YEAR to make the SL-3000??? What did they do after the first day wiring the MD in......I guess that is when they decided a new processor was in order giving us another 25 Mhz....WooHoo
Need more room, pull some flash out. Then I guess they spent 9 months on the new keyboard (which admitedly looks nice).
They don't have to do much. They've already got a big chunk of the market there, and there isn't anything that comes close to the Z for functionality at that size. They've got basically the same choice in PDAs as we have here - Keyboardless Windows CE devices and Palms, Sony's bizarre form factor keyboard stuff (The NX70/NX80 Star Trek communicators, or their clamshell with the crummy keyboard and half vga screen, can't remember what it is called), and the Z. They do have some *extremely* tiny laptops, but they cost at 3x what the Z does, and are massive in comparison to the Z.
The fact that they've added the dictionaries and translators to the Z is a killer feature for the Japanese market. Just about every shop over there sells a selection of 20 or 30 different clamshell dictionaries around the same size as the Z or a little bigger for about 20000 yen and up. (My sister has one, a Canon Wordtank, as she was teaching English over there for a couple of years.) Useful little gadgets for Kanji lookup, etc, and there is apparently a huge market for them. Putting it in the Z is a stroke of genius, as it saves people carrying 2 devices, plus the not inconsiderate cost of buying one on top of a PDA. I don't think you could do that with most PDA's over there because of the lack of keyboard on them.
I bought my 860 for a really good price, and I find that it is worth every penny, no questions asked. It replaces my Palm, my MP3 player, my laptop for 99% of things that I would lug it around for, various combo's of things I would haul around for studying Japanese, and is one of the best e-book readers around. Not to mention that it makes a damn good emergency flashlight.
I had problems with the 3000 specs when they were announced, but now there's no doubt in my mind that I'll get one within the next 6 months, because I think that having that much permanent storage on top of the flexibilty of free compact flash and SD slots is a very good thing.
(So is USB host, but I really don't understand them not using a 3.7" version of the 6000's transflexive screen. Ah well - the Z will always have flaws, but there is still nothing else like them.)
