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The vast majority of people I know who bought PDA haven't used past the 3rd day of playing.
So they keep telling me not to waste my money.
I am talking a handful of people here (boss, neighbour, friend, sister, cousin, etc)
But hey I want to play too! :(

Now most PDA's run Windows so that is a no-no.
Sharp Zaurus are difficult to get in the UK you could use an import service but you get no pound sign - having said that I noticed you can't get a pound sign here too

Can the owners tell me why? (you bunch of disgusting outsourcerers)

... Anyway, back to the main subject I was gonna buy the extremely expensive Psion Netbook
but the Linux-PDAs wave saved me from burning many-pound-sterlings unecessarily.
The Malay version more than doubled in price so am not going there ... site is off air anyway.

Now this seems like a tempting and very humble solution. It runs Linux, so a nice toy to play and learn.

You mean like a Zaurus? A friend of mine has the SL-C860 -- it's like an ickle solid state Linux laptop! :)

s/a little/a lot/

Where you went for the PC110, I went for a Libretto. And like you, mine's wearing out, and showing its age. But that's OK. My Zaurus is simply wonderful. I have a couple of the earlier models, which are fine proofs of concept, but somewhat limited for real world use. All of that changed with the clamshell Zauruses. The older models could only manage a 72 column console, even in their tiniest font, and the keyboard was a little on the small side. My C860, though, has a much bigger keyboard due to the change in form factor, and it can quite happily handle the magic 80 columns with a perfectly readable font. Combine it with a bluetooth card and suitable mobile phone, and I now have my two killer applications -- mobile web browsing, and mobile ssh access to my home and work machines. And even better, it's a full computer, running a real OS that's small enough to fit in a pocket (something the Libretto, for all its goodness, couldn't quite manage).

Yes, it's still a little on the pricey side, but fortunately, mine was bought for me by the company to allow remote administration :-) You can get them in the UK from shirtpocket, who will do the Japanese to English conversion for you and supply a complete, ready to use machine.

Sharp's marketing seems to be broken in that despite the thriving user community and demand for a zaurus model with that form factor in us/europe they seem reluctant to actually release it over here. Companies such as dynamismor shirtpocket import them or better still get someone visiting japan to bring you one back. They can be easily re-flashed to remove the japanese software and instead start speaking english which I for one find a whole lot easier to deal with ;-) There is an iminent (nobody knows quite when due to the brokenness of sharp's marketing dept.) launch of a model in the states called the Sl-6000 which is a similar (well slightly improved) set of innards and screen to the sl-c860 but in a more conventional pda form factor, very like the sl-5600 as released in the US.

My Zaurus SL-C750 has completely changed the way I read. I'm starting to get really annoyed by the physicality of real books now, in the same way that my jukebox MP3 player has made me get annoyed with CDs. There is an excellent reader program which reads all sorts of formats (including Plucker and AportisDoc), and the smooth text scrolling is supremely smooth because of the 640x480 display. And of course, I can use it in portrait or landscape mode (when the screen is rotated, the display auto-rotates).

It's so much better having a small, compact auto-scrolling backlit display to read from. Holding a book and turning pages is annoying.

They are so damn cool.

My C750 Zaurus is one of the best looking PDAs out there (the rest all being Sharp ones too) - miles ahead of any Palm, Sony or HP offering.

As well as being so goddam sexy, it has a much easier to use (for mobile computing purposes) interface than the PocketPC as well as one that is more flexible than the Palm which I find to restrictive. (Since mine is more than a productiviy tool, I use it more like a mini laptop.)

Throw in Bluetooth and WiFi (which you can use at the same time _as well_ as a SD memory card - try that with another device) for less than $600, all in a box that fits in a pocket and is reasonably robust, with 5 hours battery life... it's hard to say no.

Typical every geek in the UK will now be ordering one and VAT man will be getting his share, once the volumes of direct imports go up.

I forgot to mention this in the parent post.

If like me you're from the UK or Europe then you can get one from ShirtPocket for a whopping GBP 565!