[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by radius

I know what you mean; though in my case I would probably go for a TX over a Sony since its more recent and has better support. I'd trade the camera for faster CPU since that means its easier to watch videos without transcoding.

I got the Zodiac when my Tungsten E bit the dust. My specs for a new device were 320x480 screen, more RAM, and faster CPU. Anything else was gravy. The TX wasn't out yet. Correspondence on a Palm oriented site with another Zodiac owner convinced me it might be an applicable solution, so I bought one on eBay. I subsequently bought two more, when Tapwave's former authorized service center had a sale to clear out their warehouse: a unit originally prepped as in in-store demo unit, reflashed with a production ROM, and a unit that had been returned on an RMA as a spare parts device.

The Zodiac 2 has the large screen, a 200mhz processor, and 128MB of RAM. The big win from my perspective is two SD card slots. I have a 2GB card in each, but with a FAT32 driver transplanted from a LifeDrive, I can handle 4GB non-SDHC cards when I need more capacity. One slot is SDIO, and I have an SD Wifi card I can go online with, though I seldom do.

I haven't seen the new Nokias yet, but I've played with the 770 before, and I didn't like it all that much. I find that coming from Palm, they feel a bit sluggish in the UI and like you have to do more steps to get the same result. Also, they lack any PIM (contacts/datebook etc) out of the box.

Lack of a good PIM solution was what kept me from going for the 770. If it couldn't replace my PDA, I couldn't justify it.

For form factor and size is pretty good, but I didn't find reading on their screens any better than on a Palm. I think for me, the Palms' resolution is high enough (with anti-aliased fonts).

The Nokia does 800x600. On the Zodiac, I use FonthackV to remap fonts to custom versions to fairly good effect.

One thing I did like is the web browser on the Nokias seems far better than on Palms from what I've seen.

Palm web browsers leave a lot to be desired. On the Zodiac, I have Tapwave Web (based on Palmsource V2), Novarra nWeb (which has an actual Zodiac version), Mobirus Xiino, Opera Mini, and a version of Access Netfront 3.1 ripped from a Clie. NetFront is about the best of the lot, but it requires a couple of third-party utilities to run properly. Novarra apparently no longers offers nWeb as a retail product: they were basically a B2B company licensing software to device manufactures anyway. Mobirus seems to have gone belly up: their domain is now in the hands of a clink harvester. The software is still in various repositories but can't be registered. Opera Mini is a Java applet, and requires IBM's JVM for Palm devices. The most recent JVM for PalmOS won't run on the Zodiac, so Opera Mini works, but not as well as on the TX or other currrent Palm device.

I wouldn't call any of them good, and Blazer offered on Palm devices is apparently no better.

The browser on the 770 is a version of Opera. The 800 and 810 have one based on Mozilla code. Both are considerable improvements over Palm offerings.

I haven't seen Fbreader on one though, and might change my mind if its really that great.

I haven't either, but if it's any good on the Nokia tablet, it's a powerful incentive.
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Dennis