[jornada] Jornada 720 vs Sharp Zaurus

As a sys admin, I bought a Jornada 720 in August last year to use mainly
as a portable ssh terminal (using Mochasoft's telnet/ssh client) for logging
into Unix & Linux systems via mobile phone while I am away from base or on
holiday. Secondary considerations were the possibility that I could use it
as an MP3 player and that one day I could replace WinCE with Linux or NetBSD.

One year on, it has performed admirably as a terminal and got my clients
out of trouble many times - logging into some really busy web servers from
a beach in Tenerife or a bar in London and sorting out problems, etc, it's
been really great. As an MP3 player (even with a 256MB CF flash card), it's
not so good as the only way to get MP3 files into it is via a Windows sync
connection which is a fat lot of good if you're not a Windoze user. And
I've never been able to find any clear information on running Linux or
NetBSD on it.

I'm now looking enviously at the Sharp Zaurus - apart from running Linux
and being a familiar environment for me, getting files into/out of it
seems easy using standard ftp, nfs etc. But what's the keyboard really
like to use? It seems tiny compared with the 720's - this is very important
to me as a mainly shell user and one reason why I chose the 720 over, say,
the iPaq. If the keyboard's anything like as usable as the 720, I'm buying
a Zaurus.

Andy
Received on Tue Oct 08 2002 - 14:33:07 EDT