Looking at getting a PDA, need advice on one that suits my needs.

Discussion in 'General' started by monolith, 30 Jun 2003.

  1. monolith

    monolith True Friend

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    Hi,

    I've been considering getting a PDA for a while now, in place of a laptop for portability/size reasons. With the webhosting business, I am spending 99% of my time simply answering emails/browsing support pages we have, as well as in ssh sessions with various servers doing various admin duties (all CLI).

    I need a handheld that can fulfill these roles.

    #1 - Need some kind of network interface method in order to connect to my LAN/WAN as well as handle internet usage (aka support having a default router to fall back on if the ip you are attempting to connect to is not within the internal ip's netmask). 802.11b would be ideal, but plain ethernet would be usable if 802.11b was not available.

    #2 - Need ssh client support (version 2 is almost a must now, although version 1 _might_ work temporarily- if you make a suggestion please specify if version 2 is functional or just 1), with good enough terminal emulation ncurses based CLI applications would run properly, and things of the sort. Examples: mutt, vim, nano (for quick edits :p), etc.

    #3 - Decent webbrowser, mostly for checking email via a webmail application, as well as checking on support tickets and so forth. Java is not necessary but would be nice. Tables/frames/forms/etc must be usable, however.

    #4 - All the other cool goodies that are nice for everyday life/business operation (scheduler, etc - I think every PDA has these).

    I know I could install netbsd on something, the problem would be the lack of a good webbrowser in this case, lynx would not cut it. I need a nice GUI capable of graphical display of pages. So installing netbsd is not an option, I need some kind of PDA with native support for the above listed functionality. If I have to download a ssh client or whatever, that's fine - I just need to be sure it will work with the particular handheld I am getting.

    Thanks in advance for the help and suggestions,

    David
     

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