I don't know, I'm perfectly happy with the sharp PIM as it synchs nicely with the palm desktop.
Then you're a lucky guy, because I only managed to make it sync once... OTOH, I don't really need it to sync except for backup purposes, so I don't complain too much about that side of things. But syncing capabilities is certainly one area where Sharp didn't over-perform, especially considering that they changed the PIM database format on the most recent devices, and broke everything save the Windows/Intellisync solution, that isn't particularly rock-solid or foolproof.
There are a ton of PIMs in elsix and killefiz.
No, there are only a couple of alternatives, as far as datebook or addressbook are concerned. And nothing that meets
my needs, anyway, whereas I could find other OSes and apps that can handle things like setting a background color for a given day depending on what's scheduled at that date, for instance. But like most other stuff out there for the Zaurus, a lot of those alternatives are generally not updated on a regular basis. (well, except for KDE/PIM, which is actively maintained, but which I do not consider very much PDA-oriented as it is platform-independant).
A quick search with the "PIM" keyword brings only two results on ELSI (of which only KDE/PIM is relevant), a bit more on killefiz but basically with two relevant apps, LDE/PIM and Zcalendar. This last one looks good, but has a very limited feature set (no sync, no beam, runs on 5600 only and hasn't been updated since v0.1 beta one year and a half ago).
A search with the "datebook" or "agenda" keyword doesn't return any find on ELSI, you have to "manually" search for "Qualendar", for instance, to find it there.
As far as address book is concerned, a search with the "Address" keyword returns two relevant entries in ELSI (opie-addressbook and tKcAddressBook), and of course there's still KA/PI.
All in all, we have only a few apps, not all of which are easily found even when searching ELSI or killefiz... I don't call this exactly "tons of PIMs"!
hancom reads my spreadsheets fine. As long as it gives me functionality, I dont mind living with certain limitations, like fancy fonts.
I like Hancom sheet too, except that with large files it becomes completely unusable (speed issue). Also, I've encountered a few bugs (couldn't copy a text cell into another, it seemed that the copy function would not work for that cell - not protected in any way, BTW), and one feature (or lack thereof) that disappointed me is that it is not able to save the "freeze panes" setting, so you have to get to the right cell, and activate that menu item every time you open your file. Otherwise, I think that spreadsheet/word processor is an area where the Zaurus performs better than the average Palm PDA!
I'm quite happy that the Z has many more apps than your standard PDA does.
Uh? More apps on the Zaurus than your standard PDA? I must have bought a different Zaurus, and different PDAs before...
AND I'm happy it's not as slow as those ipaqs and such with windoze.
Well, I've used an iPaq for a while before, and numerous PalmOS PDAs as well, and the Zaurus is by far the slowest when it comes to launching new apps, or actually using basic apps like the builtin datebook for instance. I don't want to get too deep into a (off topic) comparison of those platforms, but the software seems to be the biggest cause of the overall slowness, because the C3000 CPU is the fastest I've had on a PDA, and all my previous PDAs were faster in most reards... I mean, as a mini laptop, the Zaurus is a geek's dream come true, but as a PDA, well... it's quite far from the best thing available, and pretending otherwise is bordering to fanaticism!
And the fact that progress is being made everyday.
Yes, that's true. But essentially, as was noted before, progress is being made by individual during their freetime, which means that it's slow at best, and the obstacles for would-be programmers are sometimes discouraging... By the time your favorite application reaches maturity, unfortunately, most people will have switched to another Zaurus (we're a bunch of geeks, and most of us can't resist the urge to buy the latest and fastets gizmos, can we? ) or another OS. That's why making it easier for the developers would be a good idea - in an end-user perspective!
