[Az-Geocaching] Sony PDA

[Brian Cluff]

I currently own a handspring 2 ipaqs and a sharp zaurus.
You will find that the palm OS based systems are very organizer focused, 
and although they can and do do other things, that are more of an 
electronic organizer... which is what they are ment for, so there is 
nothing wrong with that.
The Pocket PC platform is very nice.  The hardware is much faster than 
most of the palm stuff out there, and is a little more like a hand held 
laptop.  The apps that it runs tend to be much larger and a lot more 
feature rich, but that means they take more memory, but luckily the 
pocketPC devices have a lot more.
The down side to these devices is that there are almost no 
freebee/public domain software available, so right after you get it, you 
will have to pay bucks for all the software that you can load onto a 
palm based device for free.  They also really HATE to be hooked to 
anything other than a windows based OS, and I found it annoying that 
most software packages installed something into my windows box as well 
as on the pocketPC device.  That just adds to the crap I don't need or 
want on my system.

I just thought I would throw in a little something about the zaurus real 
quick, although I doubt you will get one of these.
The zaurus is by far my favorite PDA that I have owned.  It's Based off 
the same hardware platform that most Pocket PC devices are built off of. 
  Mainly because it has completely replaced my laptop.  The zaurus is a 
linux based PDA that can run pretty much anything that you would run on 
your linux desktop machine.  I've run web servers, full office suites, 
full database servers...etc...etc  It also makes a very nice PDA with 
all the bells and whistles of the Pocket PC, but with non of the huge 
overhead of haveing to buy tons of applications... just select what you 
want and it installs itself.
Also a quick note.. the iPaq can easily have linux loaded onto it with 
the same environment that the zaurus has, but I only recommend it for 
the more geeky audience.

In the end if you are only planning on storing some addresses and some 
caches and play a little Mahjong, you should go with a palm based 
system, it's not going to be worth your money to get the faster hardware.
If you are looking to replace a lot of what you are doing with your 
laptop and don't mind shelling out bucks to do it, then go PocketPC.
If you want to do everything your desktop machine is doing, and you have 
linux experience, then definetely go with the zaurus, or an ipaq with 
the familiar distribution from www.handhelds.org loaded onto it.

Brian Cluff
Team Snaptek
Geeky Type

Bill Tomlinson wrote:
> I don't have any experience with the Sony, so I can't help there.  I have
> used both the Palm 5 and Compaq iPaq.  I'm probably in the minority, but I
> prefer the Windows Pocket PC OS to the Palm OS.  I use my iPaq a lot.