I\'ve been reading about that somewhere else, makes me laugh to be honest, I never trusted Sony as far as I could throw em, they treated their customers like scum and brought out so many machines so fast it really made me feel bad once I\'d invested in their Clie. Needless to say I got rid of mine quickly and got my first Z. It doesn\'t surprise me one bit, I just pity all those people who wasted their money buying them and the people who even here on ZUG viciously defended their UX50\'s.
I\'ve known for a while that this was coming, they touted the Clie as a PDA/Entertainment device, with the PSP coming, the Clie had to move aside. I also would not be too surprised if you see a PocketPC based machine or two over the next 18 months.
Tony, I know you look for any product with any kind of clamshell dying as a prophetic sign of apocalypse but I think it\'s irrational, products come and go regardless of shape or size, regardless of VGA divisable size screens. No product nowadays is produced for too long, no profit in it. Two years is an eternity is business. They constantly want to make newer, faster and moreover more profitable goods to sell to eager buyers with full wallets.
You WILL see Sharp pull the plug on the 6000 within a relatively short period, even the Cxxx machines, but something I think most people outside Japan just don\'t get is that the Zaurus has been around a very very long time, long before Linux was adopted. It\'s an established brand probably more so than Clie or PPC, it would not be profitable for them to end that brand just yet.
In short, the Z is a Japanese specific machine, despite the odd machines which are available for short periods globally. This will always remain so. Microsoft has a market to protect, it would crush Sharp if it needed to. So we must be content with what we have, and occasionally go through hell and back to import one for our own pleasure.
Unless the next PalmOS is really unbelievably good, that too will fade within 5 years in to history with EPOC et al. You notice 3rd parties adopting PalmOS, then after a while leaving it, I can\'t help wonder why. But short of establishing a multi-million dollar co-operative to guarantee the production of our beloved machines, we too are at the mercy of men in suits far far away who don\'t care about us, just profit and statistics. Welcome to the New World Order and globalism.
