My feeling is that most Zaurus users in Japan are not Linux users. That is, they use the Zaurus as a PDA and don't really care about doing most of the advanced stuff that the people in this forum try to do. Of course there are many exceptions, but on the whole this is true. Non-Japanese Zaurus users are almost all power users, since they had to go to the trouble of importing the unit, converting it to Japanese, etc. So we're talking about a different set of priorities. Lots of non-Japanese users like to try and use their Zaurus as a laptop replacement, so having wi-fi and bluetooth just makes sense. But in Japan wi-fi and bluetooth aren't as common as they are in the US, and in any case most people will be using the Zaurus on the go, where wi-fi connections aren't easy to find. On the other hand, you have CF-sized cellular modems that give you relatively high speed Internet access throughout most of Japan.
My point is that it's not really fair to say that Sharp doesn't know what its doing with the Zaurus. It knows exactly what it's doing. It's just that Sharp's priorities are those of the Japanese market, which don't jibe with what most of us want. It would make no sense for them to cater to a few thousand foreign enthusiasts while ignoring their domestic market. Apparently it's things like extra dictionaries and (god help us) video golf lessons that make a lot of people buy Zauruses in Japan, and not things like wi-fi. This may change in the future, but for now we just have to realize that we're buying something that wasn't really intended for our market and make the best of it. (And just for the record, I would LOVE internal wi-fi on my Zaurus.)
