Zoomer PDA Hardware

PDA's

At present, there are three identical Zoomer PDA's: the Casio Z-7000, the Tandy Z-PDA, and the AST GRiDpad 2390. All models appear to have discontinued production and normal retail sales. The Casio model may still be available through a variety of retail and mail order channels. A few Tandy models may be available through Radio Shack outlets. The AST model was available through various liqudation channels. A thriving market for used models exists -- check the zoomer-list mailing list for offers to buy or sell.

Hewlett Packard has developed the OmniGo 100. It differs from the Zoomer but shares some compatibility. It is currently offered through HP's retail channels.

Sharp developed a Zoomer product called the PT-9000. It's not on the general market, but instead has been sold as an OEM product for vertical applications. Here's a picture.

Hyundai plans to release a Zoomer-like product called the Gulliver. It's still in the rumor stage.

See also Zoomer PDA Rumors and Speculations for information about potential future products.

Accessories

Accessories are available through the manufacturer's retail channels. Casio offers one set of accessories, Tandy offers another, and AST offerred yet another, all of which are presumably interchangeable between the Casio Z-7000, Tandy Z-PDA, and AST GRiDpad 2390.

Sharp has still another set of accessories for the PT-9000, but these are not compatible with the Casio, Tandy, and AST units.

A growing collection of accessories are available for the HP OmniGo 100. See the OmniGo information page for pointers.

You can obtain a wide variety of stylii and pen bodies (some of which combine a traditional ink pen with a plastic PDA stylus) from WriteWare. See their catalog or their WWW home page for more information.

Although intended for use with Newtons, Roadrunner Tracks has a line of PDA accessories which may also wirk with Zoomers. See their catalog for details.

PCMCIA cards

See the OmniGo information page for OmniGo PCMCIA information.

Modems

Zoomers support 5 volt PCMCIA cards with limited (50mA) current draw. Two PCMCIA telephone modems are supported; both are AMT StarCard models. There are 2400 baud and 14.4k baud models.

One PCMCIA wireless modem is supported: the Motorola EMBARC Newscard. It supports news broadcast only. Motorola has discontinued paging and e-mail delivery from its EMBARC service. Here's a picture of the card.

Memory

Zoomers support 5 volt, 8 bit ATA FAT format. It does not support "ffs" (Microsoft Flash File Service).

SRAM cards

The following SRAM cards are believed to work with the Zoomer:

Apple Newton 1MB SRAM p/n 649-0013A
Simple Technologies 1MB SRAM
ACE 1MB SRAM
GRiD 1MB SRAM
HP 128 RAM card

Flash memory cards

The following Flash memory cards are believed to work with the Zoomer:

all Sundisk SDP-5 and SDP-5A 5 volt flash cards (1.8, 2.6, and 5.2MB)
HP 5MB Flash card
Maxtor MobileMax flash cards (2, 4, 8, 12, 16, and 20MB)

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If you know of other hardware products which are relevant to Zoomer owners or prospective owners, please forward them to me at:

brian@grot.com 1/5/96