On 8/24/07, frantisek holop <minusf@obiit.org> wrote:
quoted text
> hi there,
>
> i am planning to go on a longer trip and i am considering buying
> a sub-sub-sub notebookish thingie...
>
> i know openbsd support zaurus quite well, and i have found a promising
> sale of a C3200 for around 500 euros...
>
> the things is, it's surprisingly hard (for me) to find any
> details about these beasts like what can i use it for in
> comparison with a notebook, how is battery life, and you know,
> just how does it fare in everyday usage....

For a trip? Just don't.
The battery life is 7 hours (12 if you pull magic hax of making the
screen turn off when not in use and compulsively put it in standby
most of the time) and a lot less with a wifi card in.
What's your usage like? It's too slow to run anything graphical
reasonably, though you can if you absolutely have to. I mostly keep it
in console with screen running a bunch of different windows with mg
running, for various note takings.

It doesn't work for every day usage. I'm getting used to it but it's
still too flakey to be trusted. I'm slowly hacking in things that make
it more friendly, but it's very slow going. Some day I'll collect them
all up and publish them, and maybe someday there will be libraries of
tips and scripts from zaurus users the world over, but we aren't there
yet.

It's very much a hacker toy, despite the "personal mobile tool" still
scrawled along the right edge of the screen.

-Nick