Jesse says...

I got my Zaurus on Thursday. It’s a pretty cool little thing. After struggling with it for two days, I finally figured out how to get it to do (most of) what I needed. I first flashed the ROM to use OpenZaurus and Opie, rather than the provided Sharp ROM. I don’t know if it was just me or what, but as soon as I did that, I ran into a zillion problems. I couldn’t install software, battery usage was really bad, and I was just not a happy camper. So, I did some research, came across the Crow ROM — which is basically a version of the Sharp ROM modified to use an SD card as your home directory — and have been getting along pretty well with that. I got a working Jabber client on it, and was better able to install software. I’m still having issues — it seems like IPKs over 1 MB just kind of crap out after a while. I’m not exactly sure why that is, but I’m basically left without Opera for the moment. I did really like the Opie interface — it had a lot of great features: screen rotate, larger pool of apps to draw from, better Wi-Fi handling, nicer overall interface. Still, I think the Zaurus will prove to have been a good investment.

In other news, I’ve made some decisions into how the phone’s interface will be set up (thanks in large part to Jeff and Robb). The faceless phone idea, while really cool, just won’t let me explore everything I want to be able to do with this phone.

In reality, it’s not a phone. It’s an IM device.

And with that comes a lot of really cool explorations. Jabber just provides so many possibilities for providing services: live weather, restaurant reviews, address/direction search, blogger, news feeds, file transfers, whiteboarding, email notifications. It would be a shame not to take advantage of everything that Jabber is through this device. Thus, I’m definitely going touchscreen based, with no hardware buttons, save for power on/off and screen lock. That gives me the most flexibility to explore interface variations, makes i18n much easier and more cost effective, and allows for doing some more PDA and tablet-like functionality. It will still be most definitely a “phone-ish” form factor though. It needs to maintain a distinct identity from PDAs, and shouldn’t feel clunky holding up to your ear to talk into.