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Behind The Coolest Gadgets - Linux or Windows?

Posted by timothy on from the no-wait-it's-forth dept.

An anonymous reader submits "Sister sites LinuxDevices and WindowsForDevices have kicked off what they're calling the Great Embedded Device Smack-Down, to see whether Linux or Windows Embedded powers the best and coolest devices. The Smackdown highlights more than 350 gadgets in nine categories, along with some entertaining "pre-game commentary" featuring the latest market share figures for the two OSes and a whacky clipart image of Stone Cold Bill Gates taking on The Tux."

2 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Sharp Zaurus? by Spyro+VII · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well, I haven't read the article yet (and by the looks of things I won't be doing it either), but offhand the only thing that I have to say is that I've never seen a Pocket PC that can stack up to the Zaurus line of handhelds made by Sharp, on either the coolness factor or the gadget factor.

    It will be interesting seeing how they weighed the Pocket PC PDAs against the Linux ones, and how the fact that a number of iPaqs can be ran with either PPC or some kind of Linux.

    1. Re:Sharp Zaurus? by TrevorDoom · · Score: 5, Interesting

      As I've owned a Zaurus 5500, Tungsten T3, and currently own a HP iPAQ 4155, I definately have to give the "coolness," "gadget," and "power" to the iPAQ hands down.

      User replaceable battery (one of the issues with the Tungsten), 400 MHz XScale processor (whole lot more powerful than the 5500), integrated Bluetooth (more than the Zaurus has) and WiFi (more than the T3 has) and with a couple of third-party apps to "fix" the annoying things about the Pocket PC operating system I'm most definately in love with this iPAQ...

      I'm sorry, the handwriting recognition on the Zaurus sucks (Decuma OnSpot for PocketPC, OTOH is able to decypher my hardly intelligable chicken-scratch) and my fingers are fat enough that trying to use the thumb keyboard is annoying at best. WiFi, while not essential in a PDA, is damn nice (access to the fileshares on the Windows network at work while doing things where a laptop isn't readily accessable but I'm in WiFi range is schweet) and gives me the ability to use Pocket Putty to ssh into my fileserver at home while sitting on the couch.

      The Zaurus has a cool "geek" factor, but really, I got tired of the shitty quality of the PIM apps and fighting with the device to try and get it to sync got old after about 3 weeks.