Jerome, you are totally right. My post was getting fat, so I oversimplified :-)

With the early "brick" models (the 5000 and 5500) Sharp made a half-hearted attempt at building an outside community. They even had a developer program with discounted units in Europe (I guess Nokia copied this for the 770 :-), and a "developer" site - that went down after a while with all its content, creating resentment (which is B.a.d.). The 6000 (with BT and/or Wifi, thus clearly for the non-japanese market) was another timid attempt at the corporate "vertical" niche, in the US. The heart of the platform (Qtopia) was closed from the start anyway.

I myself got into the game in the "clamshell" period after that, so I only knew Sharp as a maker of potentially fantastic hardware, albeit black-market expensive and hard to procure, and totally absent on the systems/software front. Progress on that side was left to freelancers such a Cacko, pdaXrom, GPE and others. Typical OSS fragmentation. When last I checked on ZUG they were still trying.

Recently I was reminded how bad things can get when I tried to use my "old" 760 with my new 54g Wifi AP secured with WPA. I ended up pairing it in ad-hoc mode with the tablet...

Nokia's approach with the 770 up to now, and the ensuing dynamics, is in a totally different league, even if it's never as fast and furious as we all would like. I just hope Ari's team doesn't fall victim to corporate logic and is given time to prove their point. I would really like to see the 880 and 990 and whatnot... just as I'd love to be riding a BMW C2 or C3 instead of a dinosaur :-)

PS: Karel, sorry for hijacking your thread :-)