Yoo Hoo........anyone Out There?

[Ragnorok]

- I've been without money, not been able to find my car keys, out of gas for the motorcycle, and locked out of the house, but I have never been without Hiroshi.  It just doesn't happen.  I don't know how often I use my Z because Hiro is always there in my butt bag ... I reach to my waist, grab, and use without a second thought.  Hiroshi always works, never crashes, never fails, never loses data, and the Z is imminently expandable and configurable to do a simply amazing number of things that were never envisioned when it was made.  In my opinion the Zaurus is what every PDA should dream of growing up to be one day.  That includes every PDA or smart phone I've see to date.

- I've taken four months to solve a single Sokoban level; this game on the Z doesn't save where you are, it saves the level you are on, so I had that game loaded and active on the task bar for four months straight, in addition to anything else I may have done during that time.  I've owned seven different PDAs and Hiroshi is the second most reliable, but the completely and utterly most enjoyable of them all.  (most reliable: Psion 5mx - no reboot for three full years until I got my first Zaurus because they stopped making Psion - bows head in silence for Psion's passing)

- I use Hiroshi primarily for PIM and games, puzzle games like Zudoku and Sokoban.  I have used the Z for music, wardriving, surfing for info, and I've fiddled around with VoIP, apache, mysql, C++ development, perl, and anything else that crossed my mind in the last four years.  The power, flexibility, form factor, and minuscule size are a real sweet spot for me.

- I don't post here much of late because I moved into a "fixer upper" house, which takes a considerable chunk of time, and this is at an excellent dark sky site, so I've taken up amateur astronomy.  I do hope to write some astro software for Hiro to run goto telescopes.  Time will tell, or it won't, Gosh Darn! ™

- Having typed all that, I'll definitely give the latest pdaX a shot once it's available!  (grin)  I like trying out distro and feel confident that some day I'll find one that works as well as Cacko.  If not ... NAND backup does just what it should, it puts Hiroshi back precisely as it was before flashing, so it's painless and fun to fiddle around with the possibilities...

[jfv]

I come to the forum daily, but have not posted much lately. Although I've tweaked my Z over the years a lot, I don't flash it because for a long time it has been my main travel machine and I needed it to work (The C860, that is. The 5000D has been flashed a lot). Now I've bought a EeePC and it might become my travel machine and I am still gathering up the courage to mess with the Z. I've been following the developments on Debian and Android and would like to try those, although most HowTo's seem to focus on the C3x00. I might be the last Sharp ROM user so there is not much reason to post.

[the_oak]

You are not the last Sharp ROM user. Those of us with 6000s probably mostly have Sharp. There are only "works in progress" available for us at the moment. I have experimented with some of these only to find myself coming back to Sharp. The default ROM is not bad. Just a little dated.

[nilch]

nilch:
You sold your 6000 with it's built-in wifi and beautiful screen?   (looking at signature) How does the N810 screen compare with the 6000? I suppose maybe the N810's browser is what made you leap.

Actually I sold my SL6000 after I had both the 6000 and the C1000 and had to choose between one ... sadly I choose the clamshell factor and keyboard of the C1000 over the 6000 screen (also sold of my C750, since wife wouldn't let me keep so many toys  

The N810 screen is great - readable in direct sunlight - but still from what little I remember, the 6000 screen was more readable and bright in sunlight.
But the touch sensitivity on the N810 screen is smoother. I miss the rotation aspect of course of the Zaurus series (there is a rotation hack for the Nokia IT's but not as good).

[Capn_Fish]

The N810 screen is great - readable in direct sunlight - but still from what little I remember, the 6000 screen was more readable and bright in sunlight.
But the touch sensitivity on the N810 screen is smoother. I miss the rotation aspect of course of the Zaurus series (there is a rotation hack for the Nokia IT's but not as good).

That's probably the biggest thing for me. Using the Z in a car during the day is near impossible, but it works fine with the N810.

As for the rotation thing, I like having landscape mode be native, since that's how I always use it (no slowdown from software rotation!). If you REALLY want to use portrait mode on ITs, maybe you should try Debian. It's likely handled better there than in Maemo (I haven't really used rotation in Debian, but when I did a while back, it worked fine).

[jocasmi]

I stay tunned and using my collie everyday. I'm also a Sharp user, C3200, the rom works well for my needs, and very stable.
So there's some sort of life out there.


Greets

P.D.

Happy 4th.

[ArchiMark]

FWIW, I'm still here.....just been super busy at work lately as my boss bailed on me 2 months ago and I had to pick up the slack.... although just got promoted last week to my ol' boss's job, so that helps a bit...

Anyway, just flashed 2or0's new Andromeda/Debian ROM and it's a beaut!.....

 

[Cresho]

Hi guys!  I'm still around you know!  I was in a recent accident and just bothered taking care of myself.  I'm fine...........I think.  

Anyway, I still use my zaurus for pictures, games, movies, music when I jog!  It is so sturdy!  cacko rom was never completed and it crashes on occasions and backup is useless but I dont care since info is on the main drive and I can easily access it.  The on ly reason I use cacko is because the kernel can overclock the cpu and underclock it for life saving battery up to 8 hours or more.  Also, my medical library and the wikipidia I have in my device.

My device is very usefull but I don't play with configurations anymore since it is ....perfect!

[Cresho]

ohh--btw, I am on the ubuntuforums under the same name.  I run pure linux and windows for some old games.  I decided to go full linux and it has been an adventure.

[Capn_Fish]

I run pure Linux and WINE for some old games.

[Angelina]

To be honest, nowadays I'm mostly using my C3200 as alarm clock, terminal and portable audio player. The latter is really important to me because I'm a music buff.

Angelina

[lardman]

I still have my Zauruses, but they don't get used any more (batteries are pretty knackered now). I moved to the Nokia internet tablets, which are pretty cool, just waiting for the next gen tablet to come out with an omap3430 or similar. I'm working on a variety of things, but mainly DSP programming (SBC encoder, Vorbis decoder, MP3 decoder).

Cheers all

Simon

[Snappy]

Now that I'm kinda stuck to a desk job, I find myself using the c1000 lesser and lesser.  I do have a notebook running Ubuntu hardy so the consolation is that I'm into linux stuffs deeper than before.  I have another notebook in my room running Windows XP Pro, but I could easily switch to ubuntu just as well.

I'm keen to try out ubuntu on c1000 sometime.  Then I'm totally ubuntunized!

I do have a eeepc 701 which is running ubuntu as well.  Strangely, like the c1000, it is not getting much love these days.  
I hate the THICK bezel ... *sigh* ...

[Mickeyl]

Still here, but not very frequently. All my Zaurus models are boxed so that they don't gather dust. Openmoko has kept me more busy than I have ever expected. Still doing lots of work on OpenEmbedded, which has become really huge.

[speculatrix]

I'm still here too. I think one "problem" with the Z is that the hardware is very well known*, so most of the steps these days are evolutionary rather than revolutionary (android being the latter), and so in one sense most things that could be done *have* been done.

people still find new and interesting ways to do stuff, like the Quasar media player.

one other thing we have to remember is that this forum is very rich in information, so nearly every question you could ask has been answered here already!

the 6000 is perhaps the exception, in particular its video hardware which is a bit of an undiscovered country.


* e.g. the oz/angstrom kernel gave us a very good base for those who want to work closer to the cutting edge of linux.