Before smartphones I was a real big PDA/palmtop computer user. I started with an old iPAQ that quickly bit the dust, then I moved up to a Sharp Zaurus SL-5500. It was a portrait form factor PDA with a slide out keyboard, and it ran Linux natively. It was pretty good. I used it for taking notes and playing music. I was kinda a nerd about compressing my music with OGG Vorbis to get as much play time as I could out of my low capacity CF cards.
Later I upgraded to an SL-C1000, pictured above. It was like a little laptop! It was Japan-only, but that didn't matter so much because of the custom ROM scene. I ran a distro called pdaXrom which basically gave me a full Linux desktop. I remember using AbiWord and Midori for word processing and web browsing respectively. It could also run Firefox, which would take a good 90 seconds to boot up, but it was necessary for getting through my college's captive login page.
Oh, and games - pdaXrom was just desktop Linux, and a good number of emulators would compile and run just fine. I ran GBC, SNES and Neo-Geo emulators. I played all the way through Super Metroid on it. The Neo-Geo emulator had cores written in ARM assembly, so it could run full speed; the ROMs needed to fit in memory though, so only earlier/smaller titles would run. Mostly I just cared about Puzzle Bobble though.
After the SL-C1000 I got a Nokia N800, which was a downgrade really. It didn't have a keyboard. The touch screen was pretty ok though. But it couldn't really run games. I didn't care as much at the time though because I was using my MacBook more for gaming, browsing etc.
Anyone else mess around with these? HP Jornada type stuff. I guess there's a little overlap with cyberdecks, but I'm talking commercial products.
