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and more attention to the little mom'n'pop hardware that is great. It will not be great for mainstreem hardware to be the sole offer, because it often undersells smaller competitors to the point of harming customers and the future innovations. It's the little man, down to the worker at his desk, that is relied for perfecting his stroke on the picture. All the painters of highest regard were somewhat sloppy in their day, and yet their "art" has endured to show forth a different interpretation of things that it continues in its own merit onto others. Somtimes you need to invest in bad hardware to allow a small company exist long enough to produce its most inspired product. I am not saying its a bad product or componay, although market reach implies such, yet consider SoftField Tech and its Linux-only PDAs. Its next release of PDAs will be verry good, but that will never happen unless people buy the already existing outdated hardware.

I am waiting for VA Software to re-enter the hardware market; and that I will to, every day. Slashdot is a great post of VA. It needs to be said, the VA hardware was a great enterprise that I am said to see fade away just because people were finding it difficult as a VAR. Somtimes, image is the only solution you can offer on a product that passes your way and that is the secret of QA.

If you just want a PDA with a CLI, and don't care much about features, don't go for a used Zaurus - go for something like this. It's the remake of the Agenda VR3, the first Linux PDA.

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.

vr3
It doensn't have usb connection, but I think it'll do for text reading and it operates on alkaline batteries.

Hardware wise, it was between the palms and the CE devices, and was priced at $250 with a 66MHz MIPS processor when the lowest prices on CE devices was around $400. Not to mention, the battery life kicked ass. A week (honestly) on 2 AA batteries, and it was fast for a PDA.

It was a good little platform. It's still available at $99 see http://www.softfield.com/vr3.html. Unfortunately the only accessory is a 56K modem.

The GUI is fast and stable. It is XFree86 and FLTK. It has true multitasking so one can have many windows open and switch between them. The best thing about the PIM was that a recompile and they worked on your Linux desktop. They were somewhat basic but worked well for me. I never ran into a limit on the number of categories, but then I only created a couple beyond the defaults. It is $99 available from SoftField.

The Agenda VR3 is pretty much what you are looking for. SoftField still offers them.

For the Zaurus, I find the Opie apps to be better than the Qtopia ones.

I have a SL-5500 for about two months. I also have but no longer use a VR3. I also am a technical support rep for one of the major Palm OS pda manufacturers.

The Zaurus is great. It is reasonably fast. I run the majority of the Apps off the SD card, so that slows things do a bit. If you make use the ram drive, as it is setup in the default Sharp ROM, it is very fast to run off the ram drive.

There is a fair amount of software and one can also make use of Java apps. Besides the PIM apps, I primarily use it as an ebook read and a check book. For those that are interested The Kompany makes several apps for the zaurus including Kapital, a Quicken like program. the Zaurus Software Index should give a good idea of what is available.

The screen is a reflective tft so it is fully usable in Bright light including sunlight. The battery will last a couple of days with normal use, much like any pocket PC device. There is also a NiCAD backup battery, though you will need to suspend the device before you lose total battery. If you do not save to the Ram drive, then everything will be restore if you lose all power as it will be saved to either internal flash, SD, of CF.

The buttons are reconfigurable, and if held for a sec or two have another function. I have sucessfully beamed between a VR3, PEGSJ20, Visor, Ipaq, and a Palm V. I have synced on both Win2k and Mandrake Linux 9.1-9.2.

Oh and the media player works nicely. The sound through the headphones is great. The built in speaker is a crappy piezo though. I personally prefer using the embedded XMMS, but there are several options.

That is what I use for my VR3. I have to setup a ppp connection over the serial port, but that is it. They use the berkeley db for a file format from Sleepycat. There are plenty of Open Source tools for manipulating that data. I typically tar and gzip all my personal data and rsync with my desktop. For a $100 it is a nice machine. In use it feels a fraction of a second slower than a Palm OS4 device, but the multitasking features beats the Palm platform hands down. If Agenda could have marketed the things, they would have had a good market share.

The new MX7 looks to be a better offering than the Royal device.

That is what I use for my VR3. I have to setup a ppp connection over the serial port, but that is it. They use the berkeley db for a file format from Sleepycat. There are plenty of Open Source tools for manipulating that data. I typically tar and gzip all my personal data and rsync with my desktop. For a $100 it is a nice machine. In use it feels a fraction of a second slower than a Palm OS4 device, but the multitasking features beats the Palm platform hands down. If Agenda could have marketed the things, they would have had a good market share.

The new MX7 looks to be a better offering than the Royal device.

These are getting common .

The original Agenda came out. You could buy it for a while from the original Agenda Computing, and can still from Softfield the maker of this new MX-7. The Agenda may have been a piss-poor PDA that suffered many long delays, but it was released and it was for sale.

I know where you can get a cheap LCD touch-screen:

Look up Softfield Technologies. I think the URL is www.softfield.com.

I recently picked one up from them for around $40 CDN to replace the one on my PDA. It isn't colour, but I haven't had any trouble with brightness, and the price is mighty good. You might have to rig your own connector to hook one of their screens up to a Mini-ITX machine, but I've heard from a friend that Softfield is really good about providing pinouts and other technical specs upon request.

Good luck, be sure to post an article about it when you're done!

Try hitting these guys. (Softfield Technologies is the company, in case I got the link wrong)

The Agenda VR3 (or just VR3... not sure what they're calling it now) is pretty much what you were asking for.

It's kinda light on features, especially compared to this new spec IBM is talking about, but uses a full Linux operating system (I think the distro is based on RT Linux), and you can telnet into it, export your X session on the VR3 to your monitor, etc, etc, etc. Fun little gadget.

I've had to replace the screen on mine, but that's because I accidentally left it on the floor one night and stepped on it first thing in the morning the next day.

Hope that helps.

I still think there's a niche for low-end Linux PDAs. Of course, Softfield is selling their improved 16M, battery-charging Agenda VR3 hardware for ~$130 as well...

Softfield is now selling these for around $105 (an extra $35 for double the RAM). With the NiMH recharging kit due out later this month I'm planning on using my VR3 even more than I currently do.

Softfield is now selling these for around $105 (an extra $35 for double the RAM). With the NiMH recharging kit due out later this month I'm planning on using my VR3 even more than I currently do.