Heh. These guys look like they're having loads of fun :-)
probably lots to be had with the SA1 too...

I was also wondering about the SA1 in comparison. Wallcraf, why did you get the PP3 and not the SA1?

Maybe because the SA1 is not available yet

LOL.

Given that the weight/size are similar, it just seemed to me that someone with enough spare cash to get a PP3 would also be able to affort a SA1.

I was not aware of the SA1 when I bought the PP3, even though I often check the dynamism web site. It may have hit the sweet spot for a fully functional tiny laptop. I would be concerned whether Window XP (and some applications) would run well on a 7" 800x480 screen. Many computers used to have VGA (640x480) resolution, but on larger screens (so readable fonts could use fewer pixels). But if I was in the market for a laptop I might still buy it today. One downside of Windows XP for me is that there still isn't an e-book reader that supports the Plucker format.

One feature from the SA1 I wish the PP3 had is an external VGA connector. The PP3 has composite video output instead, presumably because of its consumer orientation (although VGA is on many new TVs). Given VGA out, I would plug the device into my USB/VGA KVM switch and use a full sized keyboard and large screen for some tasks when at home.

The standard keyboard on the SA1 is a must for a "laptop", but on the 770 and PP3 the touch screen is used for almost everything - so working on the SA1 would be a quite different experience. The keyboard on the PP3 is much better than an on-screen keyboard for ocasional input, but is an obsticle to its use as a laptop replacement.

I have a PP3. Opened it up, stick a 1Gb stick of memory in (it takes a standard DDR 333 SO-DIMM), then do some tweaking to bring up icewm and hang some useful stuff off the menus ... and it's basically a tablet PC running a slightly borked version of Fedora Core 4. Which is what I wanted.

With the 1Gb memory upgrade the PP3 runs OpenOffice 2.1 acceptably fast, and the screen is big enough for every dialog I've bounced off. It's not quite as good at stock Firefox 2.0 and Thunderbird 1.5 -- TBird in particular has some dialogs that are too deep for the 800x480 screen, and Firefox on Linux seems resistant to attempts to change the standard menu font to something that works well on a small screen. However, the basic stuff works (with a bit of tweaking -- it helps to know your way around a Linux system!) and with the assistance of a slim, lightweight keyboard with built-in pointing stick (originally for the Samsung Q1) it works well as a Linux UMPC workalike.

There's not really any comparison with the Nokia 770, IMO. On the other hand, if you don't run your life around PIM tools, the 770 *is* a pretty good competitor for the Palm TX, in all respects save speed -- and it's infinitely better as a web/ebook reader.