During 2020 I have had a ready Sharp Zaurus on my desk. It was the
SL-C3200 (that fat one with the real HDD). While it is the most
powerful Zaurus in existence it is also the heaviest one and its HDD
(while offering benefits like large spece for files and the swap area)
has obvious impact on battery life. My device also has loose screen
hinges which makes its use less comfortable.
Thus I have decided to put it back to storage box and tu use a older,
lighter and cute white SL-C760. It has no, no USB, just a half of RAM
and a weaker CPU but the rest of features is similar to the C3200. And
it can work longer on the same battery.
I have reviewed the stuff which is available here: no compilers nor the
TeX is installed (I have them on a CompactFlash card which is not
inserted). But the basic set of applications is here: the terminal
emulator Konzole, the office package and the mail client, the ZEditor
(the text editor optimised for the Zaurus, that is), the Gnuplot and so
on. The NetFront and the Opera are also present (they cannot acces
https:/, of course) and the RSS client Zocalo is here, too.
Now I have no router which can work with the "b" WiFi standard. So I
have to connect the Zaurus to the Internet with use of an CompactFlash
Ethernet card. So I can read RSS feeds (the Zocalo is actually almost
perfect, the only issue is that it can understand non-UFT-8 encodings),
exchange files with the SCP, use the Telnet and the SSH (to some sites)
or read e-books and write texts or programs (I must try to compile some
BASIC interpreter here!).
I also filled the calendar with the most important events. Just in
case. I still think that Zauri are one ow very few pocket computers
with color screens and keyboards that actually works (and they are
fast!). With their (albeit limited and old: they do just DOC/XLS)
office applications (a word processor and a spreadsheet) and other
stuff they still can be used as pocket workstations... It makes little
sense to use it as such these days (I still have no reasons for travel)
but hey, it is still possible to use them as such.
