Sharp Zaurus SL-C860
E gave me the coolest gadget ever for my birthday: the Sharp Zaurus SL-C860. It’s only sold in Japan, which means it comes by default with everything only in Japanese. A company in the US has a business going for selling them in the US with 97% of the content converted to English after bringing them over from Japan. Unfortunately, my C860 was shipped without the required change being made.
Today I finally got the file used to do the conversion, but they didn’t include any instructions. Gahh. I asked for the details via email, but while I was waiting I decided to see if my original Sharp Zaurus SL-5500, bought with my buddy Doug a few years ago on a visit to California, could help out. Yup, got the SL-5500 going again (its fatal flaw is that if the battery dies, you lose everything you did since the factory copy booted) and was able to copy the file over onto the SDRAM card. Pop out the card, pop it into the new SL-C860.
But what to do with it? I was able to look at the Backup/Restore program on the old Zaurus, and find the program on the C860 that looked the same (even if all characters were in Japanese). That was enough to go through the steps to make it restore this image from the company, which did all of the work.
Next game is getting the CF cards for either wireless or wired networking to work. That’s okay, this was the impossible part (I sure hope). 🙂
