I bought the SL-6000L for $380 on Amazon in early December, but I only recently picked it up because I had to fly home to the US to do so. A trustworthy friend of mine had recommended the Z to me when I mentioned that I was toying with the idea of buying a PDA -- that is, trying to invent enough reasons to justify it. My criteria were extremely specific and didn't help matters. I was looking for a sub-$400 model with a hideaway thumb keypad, lots of RAM, built-in WiFi, extensability, and with a dedicated community of developers and users. As a Mac user (switched in 2001 and now rabidly pro-Apple), the latter was especially important to me.
After unpacking and working with it for a little over a week, I must confess to being utterly wowed by the hardware but mildly disappointed by the software, above all the lack of a good sync utility. Handcom Word and Sheet are great, and so are QTmail and Opera (I've actually since installed the IBM multimodal version with Opera 7.55); but what I really need (okay, want) is a portable device that will handle all my contacts, e-mail, grocery shopping and book/CD/DVD lists, calendar entries and to-do's, and an MP3/AAC player -- a mini-Mac, in other words, something I can sync and take on holiday so I can listen to digital music and write, say, a book review and submit it from a hotspot on the road.
I went with the Z instead of a Palm primarily because I wanted to learn about Linux firsthand. I can't stomach the gadget-happy trendies who don't understand the technology they're blindly embracing, and I love the idea of open-source development. But I'm not a power user, and, as far and I can tell from what has been debated in these very forums, there appears to be a lot of OS choice -- fragmentation, you might call it -- but not a heck of a lot of useful, stable, feature-rich, updated software that works without serious command-line tweaking. GAIM, for example, hasn't been updated in almost a year, even though
the website promises a v.5 "soon". This is one app I looked forward to installing, but I spent several frustrating hours trying to find a workaround before giving up. Same with the less-than-stellar (when it does work at all) ZMacSync. Even the trouble
between Z models is discouraging, such as when newly released software -- Cacko 1.22 comes to mind -- runs on older or Japan-only Zs but not newer ones like the 6000.
Don't get me wrong. I have no regrets at all and no intention of parting with my 6000L anytime soon, but if I'm to be completely honest, I haven't collapsed on the floor due to unbridled hysterical elation over my Z. Maybe I was too much of a geek romantic to imagine such a thing was possible at all.
The lingering optimist in me does, however, see good things on the horizon with Qtopia 2.1 and (later still) 4, and maybe the forthcoming Palm Linux-based distro if it runs on the Z. Based on personal experience, I came to the Mac during the uncomfortable transition from OS 9 to OS X, back when X apps were in scarce supply and Mac/Win compatibility was still a niggling issue, and now I'm collapsed-on-the-floor-elated that I did.
If I'm missing anything here, please correct me. The Z, its history, its support base and the terminology are still very new, so I may easily have things mixed up or overlooked something obvious. But this, for better or worse, has been my first impression of the 6000.
