[geeks] PDA's

[vance at neurotica.com]

On Sun, 7 Sep 2003, Mike Meredith wrote:

> > Second, does it support Microdrives in the CF-II slot?  I might get
> > one of the new 4-giggers if I can come up with that much money.  How
> > about a 2.2GB solid-state CF-II card?
>
> Are you *really* sure you're going to need that much space ? A
> microdrive is going to suck your pda's battery's clean in a
> distressingly short amount of time. If you replace WinCE with NetBSD you
> still may not be using as much storage as you might think ... how much
> storage did a DECstation 5000 have ? I'm doing ok on a Zaurus with a
> little under 256Mbytes, so I'd guess 512Mbytes would be plenty.

I'm *not* absolutely sure that I want a Microdrive.  There are some very
large (>1GB) solid-state CF-II cards coming pretty cheap lately.  I might
do one of those.  If I do NetBSD, will I need to use swap?  The limited
number of write cycles on solid-state flash concerns me.  Am I right to be
concerned.

> And you can always upgrade later.

Indeed.

> > Third, is the 131MHz NEC/MIPS VR4121 in the 770 fast enough to play
> > MP3 and FLAC?  How about the 168MHz VR4121 in the 780 and 790?  Has
> > anyone tried getting xmms working on a palmtop?
>
> xmms is available for the Zaurus although I haven't tried it. The OPIE
> player works fine for me.

That only works under Linux, though, right?

Peace...  Sridhar