Sharp Zaurus 5800

I love my Sharp Zaurus 5800
it has the best keyboard I have ever seen for a small palm top computer.

I bought the Sharp Zaurus 5000 because I liked the keyboard, I do a lot of typing and keyboards are very important to me when I am writing.

I tried keyboards from dozens of different computers and for a palm top the Zaurus 5800 series is the best I have found.

It is the smallest keyboard that you can type with both hands at full speed.

Having the battery backup is really nice, several times with other pda's I have spent the whole day typing and run the batteries down low enough that I could not do the transfer to my main computer. Then when I change batteries I lost everything.

With the zaurus 5800 I don't worry about the batteries running down. You can even take them out for a week and all your data will be there just as you typed it.

Another nice feature is the ac power cord incase you want to do a transfer and you don't have some charged up batteries lieing around.

The back Light is more useful than I thought it was going to be, I started with a Zaurus 5000 computer.

The Zaurus 5000 is the same unit without the backlighted screen. I am surprised at the number of times I am in a low light condition and need to see the screen.

One problem is that you have to go to a particular menu and push a small button on the screen to turn on the backlight, and if you can't see the screen this is impossible to do.

So you need to find a light bright enough to see the screen to turn the backlight on, this is usually not that hard to do it is just a little inconvienient to have to take these extra steps every time you turn your Zaurus off.

The convienence and the speed of the keyboard more than makes up for any drawbacks.

I have tried countless palm computers and none of them close to this size have a keyboard that you can type full speed on.

There are three font sizes to choose from so at the largest font, your documents are quite easy to read.

I just purchased my third zaurus this month, that's how much I like this computer.

I bought my first Zaurus 5000 on ebay it was a very good deal at the time for $250

I then purchased a zaurus 5800 because I wanted the backlight feature, I have used it a lot and think it was worth while.

The first two did not come with any accessories because they were used and the power supply and transfer adptors were extras I didn't want to pay for.

My first zaurus 5000 came with the small external modem and I used that to transfer all the files.

I now have switched to cable for my internet so I don't use the modem on my computers at home anymore, so I decided I would look around for a transfer cable.

I found I could buy a transfer cable with a power supply and a zaurus 5800 on ebay for $29 including shipping.

This is about half what the transfer cables used to cost. This was just too good of a deal to pass up so I purchased my third zaurus to get the transfer cable.

The backlight also wears out after a couple years of normal use so I figured this way I will get a backup when my backlight starts to die.

The computer I received has been used very little, someone used a regular ball point pen to write on the screen a couple times I cleaned it off and it is almost unnoticable now.
the keyboard buttons work execelent on all 3 computers.

I have typed in about 25 pages this week and the memory used looks like it is around 1 or 2 percent. For typing which is the only thing I use it for this is more than I will ever use.

I was able to easily locate some transfer software on the internet and it works flawlessly.