Kicking Myself
I finally gave up on the XDA and stripped it for spare parts as the main connector was broken. I've been holding out in the hopes I'd get a similar 'phone somewhere with a cracked screen (I narrowly missed one on its way to the dump). It just dawned on me that with the Bluetooth adaptor for communications all I needed to do was get power into the XDA and I'd have had a very useful pocket computer. Of course at the time I wasn't even aware you could send serial data via Bluetooth so I guess I have to put it down to the learning curve, but it's still annoying.