Yo! My first couplea questions.

[Pele]

Heya y\'all...

Been lookin for a good functional PDA... My old Uniden UniPRO (WinCE like 1.0 or something) was a POS, and my Apple Newton 120 is just too clunky and akward... My alternatives were Palm or Zaurus... Luckily I found an SL-5500 for $160.  I can\'t wait till it gets here and hope it\'s not missing too many accessories.

Anywhozer... Now I need some memory for it... Lookin at Kingston\'s website, they sell a 512 MB SD card... Is this size compatible or supported? Anyone use this? It costs about as much as my Zaurus did. (CF is going to be used by Socket WiFi card, GPS card, or a Microdrive.)

Next question... Battery life... Any good on the stock battery? I\'ve searched and seen that the 5500 Battery works on the 700 series to make it smaller... Will the same be true only making the 5500 bigger? Good cause I have a habit of loosing small things, plus I don\'t need it falling outta my pocket when I wear khakis or slacks.

And finally, how good is the front end on this? I\'m not terribly proficient at *nix O/Ses... I\'m learning FreeBSD a little bit, and I\'m gonna trade my PC out for an SGI Indigo2 or perhaps an Octane as my primary desktop workstation.

Thanks much.

[Foxdie]

Yup the Z\'s support 512MB SD cards however it\'s no good for fast transfer rates. It\'s good enough for MP3\'s and low bitrate (less than 256kbit) video\'s.

The battery life is typically around the 1 hour mark if you use it intensively.

The front end (Qtopia for Zaurus) is quite easy to use, you only need to deal with text based complicated work if you do stuff like kernel recompiles / flashing etc which you won\'t need to do within the first month at least.

[Pele]

If I do happen to dump the flash and render the unit useless, I can reflash it back to normal right? My only punishment for being a dope would be loosing any saved work... (Which would goto an external card... I\'m fidgety and curious, not stupid.  )

Should I get a smaller card for faster access, or are all SD cards slow access?

I probably wont be using it as a high quality MP3 player... I have a MiniDisc player for good music. I\'ll probably be putting apps on the SD card. Maybe 160 or 192Kb/s MP3\'s at the most.

[Foxdie]

Rendering the unit useless by means of a messed up flash is affectionately called \"bricking\" around these parts (turning ones zaurus into a brick), but to answer your question the majority of bricked Z\'s can be recovered from (albeit losing all data not stored on CF / SD cards).

The read / write speed of the Zaurus is unaffected by the different speeds of the latter-released SD cards I\'m afraid, all will be the same speed. I personally recommend storing MP3\'s and other documents on the SD card, not those which require high data rates like video\'s. Only put apps on the SD card if you\'re not bothered about a couple of second load time for that particular application.

CompactFlash is the best one to use for high data rates, and if memory serves you can currently buy a CompactFlash WiFi card somewhere that also has built-in 128MB storage (but that will no doubt increase with time).

I think the majority of the reasons people bought a Z is because they\'re curious how far it can be pushed, to find the limits. At least with this PDA if you mess something up most likely you can clean everything up.