Should I buy a 5500?

[Anonymous]

First of all let me get this out of the way: I am not at all familiar with Linux. I worked with it a little back in 95 but nothing since then. I don\'t own a home computer. A friend is offering to sell me his 5500 for 100 dollars with with a Prism2 WiFi card. All I am looking for is something to do basic web browsing with at public WiFi spots. Would the Zaurus be a wise or stupid thing to by for my needs?

[bluedevils]

if basic wifi is what you are looking for then the Z is good.  Opera is one of the best browsers.  You do not need to know linux to operate it.

[Anonymous]

Is the price he\'s offering me a good one? How difficult is it to connect to public WiFi spots with the Prism2?

[dmilligan]

I would say that was a decent price - new 5500\'s were going around $200 recently not including the wifi card.  As for connecting to public wifi spots, it shouldnt be too difficult - would probably depend on the hot spot.  I use my 5600 to browse wirelessly at home and it works quite well - nice to be able to quickly check email without waiting for a whole system to come up.

[DrWowe]

I\'ll add this 2 cents:  Web browsing on a 240x320 display is irritating, no matter what OS it runs.

[Ethereal]

OTOH, Opera does a very impressive job of \"reflowing\" web pages to fit the screen--into one very tall column the width of the screen.  The effect is a little wierd, but very readable and decently navigable.  And you can turn it off if you want to scroll two-dimensionally around the page as it would display on a regular monitor.

One thing about Zaurus WiFi that is different from other wireless handhelds I have seen/used: there is no autodetection of available networks.  I had an iPaq 4350 for a couple of (very long and aggrevating) months, and it would detect and attempt to configure any access point in range.  With the Z\'s WiFi setup, it has to be \"spoon fed\" SSID for any network you want to use.

[DrWowe]

OTOH, Opera does a very impressive job of \"reflowing\" web pages to fit the screen

It does work well on some pages, but other pages become unreadable, especially if the tables are an essential part of the formatting.  As a result, I have to keep switching back and forth between the two modes, and scrolling around.

I said, irritating, not impossible.

there is no autodetection of available networks.  I had an iPaq 4350 for a couple of (very long and aggrevating) months, and it would detect and attempt to configure any access point in range.  With the Z\'s WiFi setup, it has to be \"spoon fed\" SSID for any network you want to use.

Hmm, I\'ve never had that problem, using a Netgear MA-701 wifi card.  It does autoconnect to my networks.  Although I do wish there was nice GUI tool to configure things on the fly.

[n8a]

I\'ll add this 2 cents: Web browsing on a 240x320 display is irritating, no matter what OS it runs.

True, but with the ability to flow the page through the tiny zaurus 5500 screen, I\'ve become addicted to connecting via bluetooth and reading message boards, articles, and lots of other text-heavy pages.  So for me and my browsing tastes, the 5500 is a great pda browser and email reading tool and I use it a lot for both purposes, both of which require a keyboard IMO.

[xamindar]

I have the 5600 and often use it to browse the web in public hot spots.  It works great and with the addition of kismet which will scan for hot spots you will be able to find them.

Now does anyone have any info on how long the 5500 battery will last with a wifi card on?  My friend\'s 5500 with an ambicom card seems to last about 1 1/2 hours to 2 hours before it needs a recharge.

[Anonymous]

You can also install the qpe-rotation and qt-embedded-rotation-fix, which will allow you to selectively rotate the screen.  I use it with Opera all the time, and shrink the display to 60% unless I\'m having trouble reading the text.  
I\'m running OS 3.13, with japanese language support (including handwriting recognition) and most all of my software running off of my 64MB MMC card.  That leaves about 10MB of internal storage and usually 9MB of RAM free.

[DrWowe]

I think the SL-6000 will be a much better web browsing device for two reasons:
1) 640x480
2) on-the-fly rotation

I realize the 2nd is just a software issue, but its still tough to do using standards ROMs on the 5x00.   Normally, don\'t you have to reboot the machine, or at least restart Opera?  That would get old fast.

The built-in wireless doesn\'t hurt, either.

[dmilligan]

Good points but back to the original question, $100 for the 5500 + wireless card is a decent price and much lower then the current $63X of the 6000.  If you are looking for the best wifi solution then the 5500 may not be it, if you currently have nothing and think you want to use wifi then I would go with the 5500 for the $100 - worst case is that you find its not quite what you wanted and you have only spent $100.  At that price you could move it on eBay quite quickly I would imagine and then move up to something that meets your needs.  Personally I dont think you could go wrong with the 5500 in order to get your feet wet so to speak.  I use my 5600 with wifi and it works quite well most of the time - better then my Sony Clie - of course this may be in part due to Netfront on the clie and Opera on the 5600.  My only issue is that at times I have to exit opera as there isnt enough memory left.  With the 5500 and openZaurus you can probably configure your 5500 to have more available ram and surf a little more seemlessly.  Just some thoughts.

[zaurusaardvark]

Snap the guys arm off !
Hell I\'d buy it for spares :-)
Web browsing on opera on the zaurus is great, easy and yes it does automatically scan and detect available networks and knowlege of linux is completely unnecessary (haven\'t got a clue myself but yet to find anything I can\'t do on the zaurus - except install opie mediaplayer 2).
It does depend to large extent on just how small minded and nitpicking an individual you are (no insult intended). If you\'re one of those people who can\'t handle a touchpad or bear to look at a screen at less than 800x600 res. Then you probably don\'t want a pda at all. If you\'re prepared to try something new you\'ll be more than pleasantly surprised at just how good the net can be on such a small device.
I also concur that about 1-1 1/2 hours battery life is about right for active web browsing - though I tend to mainly use my screen on half power brightness and that really helps :-)

[Anonymous]

for an extra $30 you can get a spare battery and double your browsing time.