On Sat, 24 Jan 2009, steve wrote:
Hello Dr.,
I am a bit late in this thread since i haven't been reading the list for a few days, however, as a long time PDA user (starting from one of the earliest casio digital diaries, to casio PV, to a palm III, to a palm lifedrive to my present nokia n810), i feel your pain.
I know what you're talking about I started off using the tiny credit card sized thingy from casio, then came one of the bigger _64 kb_ :) clamshell, them a Palm 100, then a Handspring visor with a then biggest addon of 8 mb memory (which is still almost half empty). This was followed by a Sharp Zaurus 5500 but it has lousy battery life.
If you are looking for a good no hassle PDA, mainly for PIM purposes (like you listed) as opposed to a PIM+Media manager (for mp3s, video, ebooks, ...blah, blah), I would recommend getting a phone instead of a PDA. I have heard good things about the motoming, tho' i can't comment on it since I don't use it.
I somehow don't like the motorola phones, doing a bluetooth transfer or pairing has always been a pita (I'm talking about the L6, L7, Razr and Rokr.) Nokia has always been much more user friendly - ymmv. I am looking at pinching my wife's E51 to fiddle around with for a few days :).
I also have heard good things about the Nokia E71.
Now, if you /do/ want a PIM+Media manager+a palm sized proper linux system, I'd suggest investing in a Nokia N810 (or the discontinued earlier version N800)
http://www.nseries.com/products/n810/#l=products,n810 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N810
wow -- I'm looking at it right now.
These run Maemo desktop: http://maemo.org/
It *is* expensive, but you may find cheaper resale pieces on ebay. Also, once you have the n810, although you would be able to sync to linux natively (in fact you could also use the very same applications on your desktop as well as the pda -- the gpe suite[1]), you'd find it more convenient to sync to something like google calender if you so wish.
If you have questions, i'd glady answer them since i tend to use my n810 a lot.
Like I said, a wallet program and the ability to install any program I may need to. Said programs need not be free as in beer. Anyway maemo is based on good old debian so I'm sure there will be tons of software available. What comes to mind are mutt, gpg, kismet...
regards,
- steve
regards,
Sharukh.