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I read books on my Zaurus (using QTReader) and it works great! In fact, I'm starting to prefer it to reading a paper book.

You dont need a reading light, its smaller than a normal book, its easier (and less straining) to hold when you get used to it, and it always remember where you were last time.
Plus I have almost as many books in there as my whole paper library, easily avaliable.

Interesting experiences, did you get it new or used? I've had no problems with mine.
no speaker- it has a headphone/mic combo jack
battery- the manual claims 10hrs, I get 2-2.5hrs with wireless card and have never been away from the docking station long enough to fully drain it with the non-media player apps. The display is clearily visable with the light on setting 2 of 5, saves power.
serial- mine has a USB docking station, do you have the SL-5500D the earlier Developer model?
crashing- never happened to me, I'm using the v3 Sharp rom

I've had mine for 23months, got it new for $195
It's great, used evey day for scheduling, mini-office apps, email, games, media player(mp3&mpeg1) and wireless connection. I get 2-2.5hrs with the AmbiCom WL110C-CF, make sure you get a low power card or you may end up with only 30min to an hour.
There are plenty of accessories; bluetooth, external keyboard, external monitior, gps, make sure they're compatable, SD&CF slots. And more than enough free/low cost software: http://www.killefiz.de/zaurus/

Cons: it's only 206MHz with 32MB each for RAM and internal storage, some apps will only install to internal storage, so got a 1GB SD and 256MB CF cards. But what do you expect from a 4yr old machine?

Who doesn't have a fully capable ssh client in their shirt pocket?

PuTTY works on Symbian S60 and S90 and QIC and PPC and lots of other things, as does Mochasoft.

ssh for blackberry is at http://www.needtext.net/shell/index.jsp

ssh for palmos is at http://www.sealiesoftware.com/pssh/

ssh for native Sharp Zaurus (i.e. without replacing the OS) is at http://www.killefiz.de/zaurus/showdetail.php?app=1 035

ssh for Pocket PC is at http://pocketputty.duxy.net/viewtopic.php?t=5

ssh for Symbol industrial handhelds is at http://www.pragmasys.com/HandHeld/industrial_pocke tvt_index.html

ssh for non-smartphones (i.e. regular phones that have a JVM) is at http://www.idokorro.com/imsshphone.html

I couldn't find ssh for the Newton, I admit. But that doesn't fit in a shirt pocket.

Did I miss anything? Anyone ported it to the ipod yet?

You can run Kismet, play nethack, even run servers like apache, etc. I VNC into mine from my laptop, making data entry a snap. Even when no other connections are available, wireless adhoc works great.

It is pricy though...not for the frugal. They even have X windows on it, an entirely free ROM (called OpenZaurus), and a version of Konqueror for it. Bochs, SNES9X, and other emulators work as well. It comes with a terminal emulator, and I found it to be a good general purpose linux box. Even the package format is just a glorified tgz (kind of along the lines of .deb packages), so the whole thing (including at home development) is pretty easy.

Yes; there is a Linux port. It even runs nicely on the Sharp Zaurus!

http://www.killefiz.de/zaurus/showdetail.php?app=1 214

I personally use Dillo when memory is tight (I've only got 512 MB of RAM). It's got tabs, is very speedy, generally renders fine and small footprint (~400KB). I use FireFox and Konqueror for my primary browsing, but Dillo is quite handy when I have applications compliling or I'm burning a CD.

I recall several months (possibly a couple years) back in Zaurus dev newsgroup a thread about porting Mozilla to the Qtopia/ARM platform and it was determined that it just simply couldn't be done and maintain efficient memory usage. The specs of PDAs have not changed drastically in the lsat 2 years, so I'm eager to find out if some sort of "breakthrough" was accomplished that allowed Mozilla to have a reasonable footprint on low-memory devices. Opera for Qtopia/ARM will be hard to beat. The only thing I miss is tabs, but it does have its own windowing system of sorts that assists in pop-up blocking and keeping track of opened links. It's also worth noting that Konqueror has been ported to Qtopia/ARM as well.

Either way, I'm excited about the prospect of being able to use Mozilla on my Pocket PC or Zaurus (PocketIE is atrocious)

Forget palm, get a Zaurus and have it your way.

No silly application-file ownership, no proprieratory OSes (can run an opensource linux, including OpenZaurus, Gentoo, and probably others. I particularly like the Gentoo build, as I can use distcc with my home machine to do the actual builds for my zaurus all over WLAN. Then sit back and reap the rewards of hundreds of precompiled packages and thousands more that you can build yourself using the ARM toolchain.

I don't know about you, but these things when compared to a tunsten just seem a whole lot sexier to me.

The Sharp Zaurus is being discontinued in the USA while in Japan they are coming out with a new model.

You can pick up a Sharp Zaurus 5500 from ebay for under $200.

I've had mine now for almost a year with hardly any complaints.
I never really used the original Sharp OS on it because of its limited capabilities, but OpenZaurus is a great alternative.

Its functionality as a PIM really sucks but its available packages is really extensive
Its really no biggie to install OZ and can be ran directly from an optional SD card to save space on your internal RAM (16MB I believe.) Plus it has a CF slot available for your favorite card (wireless, ethernet, gps, IDE, etc) and the serial at the bottom for rs-232 compliant devices.

It really has saved me time and trouble at work using a wi-fi cf card, vnc client or rdesktop (user machines or server), konqueror, and a sd storage disk to hold everything (including my mp3s.)

It kills my battery ( 1-3 hours continous,) but if I just plug it in while I'm at my desk I have no issues at all.

Zaurus Software Index.

Duplication of efforts?

Bye egghat.

[ tons of tips and ideas what's possible with a Z follow ]

The 5500 and others are more like little Linux laptops then PDAs. While I am far from a typical PDA user, the absolutely INCREDIBLE stuff I can do with just a 5500 and a wireless card continues to astound me today. To be fair, I never bought a Zaurus with the intention of ever doing typical PDA like stuff, but just wanted an easy familiar environment to hack in.

Years ago I had a USR P1000 (The Palm 1000, before Palm bought it from US Robotics), and while it was a great PDA (for the day), it was underpowered for what I wanted and most importantly LACKED A KEYBOARD, which makes all the difference in the world. One day I worked an ENTIRE day with only my P1000, a ssh client and a (9600 baud) serial link to my cell phone to see just how doable it was. As a unix admin doing security work the P1000 did have SOME uses (serial console to Sun boxes, ssh client for accessing mail via Mutt, etc) but the end result was a less than productive day overall. Trying to edit files on unix boxes with vi using Graffiti was quite painful and I vowed I'd never buy another PDA until it had at least a minimal keyboard to work with.

Fast forward to my (now several years old) 5500. Shortly after getting it I wiped the original Sharp rom and replace it with the actively developed OpenZaurus distribution, and was very happy with the results.

I have a very portable linux box with wireless, nearly all the software I was using on Solaris and Linux, as well as the pretty Qtopia apps and a half-way decent environment. I've been able to get nice tools like nmap, p0f (Passive OS Fingerprinter), Kismet, and other excellent unix based tools working with minimal effort on the Z under OpenZaurus (and the a lesser extent the Sharp ROM). Under OZ I can compile and run MANY common exploit tools like the awesome Metasploit framework, which require perl, and to a less extent Python. Both are no big deal to get going on the Z, especially since the Z is binary compatible with the IPAQ based Familiar distribution, and usually just needs the odd library to get an app working. That's all fine for text based apps, but since OZ (using Opie, at least) is QT and not X based, a variety of GUI based apps don't easily run. There ARE solutions to getting X based apps to run with minimal fuss, including the original x11zaurus package, and more recently the excellent X/QT package, as well as simply running one of the versions of the vncserver for Zaurus which of course allows you to display X not only on your Z, but also on any other VNC compatible device (such such as you cell phone, Linux, Windows, etc).

More recently the GPE environment and projects has become available, and is offers an attractive alternative to Opie, but with X11 compatibility built in.

For me, I joined the Debian religion ~5-6 years ago after experimenting to see what all the fuss on /. was all about. It didn't take long before I was the typical Debian crack addict apt-getting any application I wanted to check out on a whim. After living in Ottawa for years I was very well aware of the Corel (and later Rebel.com (who themselves were called Hardware Canada previously, and were a unix reseller) Netwinder , which was a cool little ARM based PC, which unfortunately suffered under the idiocy of Corel's managem

Instead of creating ever more powerful remotes, slowly reaching the level of PDAs, why not just control your stationary gadgets by using your PDA as a remote? For example: http://www.killefiz.de/zaurus/showdetail.php?app=9 19

I wander the house using WiFi and my Sharp Zaurus as a Voip cordless phone. works great with the right headset and this app

no problems and my GF sees no problems surfing the net while I am talking, and I get no more noticable delay's than what I get from a regular long distance connection...

now network congestion somewhere out on the net causes a hiccup once in a while but nothing that is as bad as most nextel phones have every day.

See www.pdaXrom.org, this article on cross-compiling, Gentoo for Zaurus, the Zaurus Software Index, the Zaurus Message Board, Zaurus.spy.org, and last but definitely least the Zaurus User Group (which among much else has active discussion of where to buy the clamshells from).

Bochs on Zaurus Software Index.

I ran bochs (but not windows, not a large enough flash card at the time). It was slow (hey, no suprise there), & I wouldn't want to run windows, but it was possible, and didn't need some hack like increasing screen resolution (something sdl handled). Of course, with the new Zauruses, you wouldn't have to increase the resolution, either via OS hacks, or SDL scaling.

Yeah, gotta agree with your appraisal -- the advanced functions and networkability is great, but the basic pim features are weak. The basic address book is crap, and after a couple of months of fiddling I still can't get TKCAddress to import anything at all. But I've got the to-do list problem licked. Until 6 months ago, I stuck with my palm-based Handera 330 for one main reason: Brainforest, an excellent hierarchical tree manager that you could configure for use as a multilevel to-do list (1/x complete), project manager (x% complete), etc etc.

After looking long and hard, I found StageOne on the Z to be everything that Brianforest was, and more. In addition to a really nice UI, it includes nice features for use as a contact manager (time/date marked items), html import/export -- great for brainstorming the outline of a document, then brining it into a word processor for actual writing, and the list goes on. Yeah, it's payware but I've gotten an order of magnitude more value from my $12. (Std disclaimer - I have nothing to do with the author of Stageone, blah blah...)

It seems much nicer than the few other options I've tried on the Z. Layout is great, screen resizing works, and it's quite stable. My only gripe is lack of keyboard shortcuts for new-item and grab&move-item functions. Gotta keep grabbing the stylus between each item. (If the author reads this, I suggest using similar hierarchy management keys as MSWord: shift+up/dnarrow to grab/move; shift+rt/lfarrow to pro/demote; return for new line, etc.)

Jon

Then, install these apps:

• OpieReader (aka QTReader). Reads Palm DOC files, zTXT, Plucker, HTML, plain text (normal or gzipped), and ppms text (I don't know what that is). It's very configurable for your Zaurus's hardware buttons, and Zaurus units have native screen rotation abilities already.
• qpdf2. This is a full PDF viewer that will let you open standard, untranslated PDFs. There is no need for any sort of desktop "conversion" program like you see on some other platforms. It's an awesome program and handles embedded fonts and graphics just like you'd want it to.

The device itself runs on Linux with Trolltech's QT/Embedded, and ships that way from the factory. Although there are not yet any Linux tools to sync with the newest ROM versions (MacOS X tools may exist), there are these workarounds available:

1. You can install a VNC server on the PDA to help you with data entry, and use rsync to back it up. (This is my preferred method.)
2. You can re-flash the unit with any of the numerous custom ROMs out there. Check out OpenZaurus, which is a Free Software fork of the QTopia environment that comes with it. TrollTech's free QTopia Desktop is available for Linux and can sync with that, as can several other tools like KitchenSync. Or, you can check out PDAXROM (formerly Cacko) for a true X11-based environment.

The one requirement of yours that it will fail is price. Depending on the unit, expect to pay at least $600 (some of the higher-end ones go for that much on ebay). But this unit is much more capable than $600 units from Palm, Sony, or HP/whatever. It really does behave similarly to a laptop, given that it runs a *real* OS. A quick scan of the Zaurus Software Index will reveal all sorts of programs, and you can easily compile others (yes, you can run gcc on the Zaurus itself, too). If you look at it in that light, it's good deal.

Yes. I concur.

The Z is amazing for this, in fact utilizing the software available on the popular downloadsite including flite (festival lite) the Z can provide an excellent Reading/TTS environment complete with shell scriptable goodness.

I would *love* to own a Zaurus (I'd kill for a 6000 especially) as a powerful, portable complement to a powerful, sit-on-the-floor desktop box, but having owned an 8MB Handspring Visor Deluxe for the last few years and given that I write a lot (both code and regular text messages), I compromised between a PDA's portability and my desktop's power and got a laptop recently for primarily the following 2 reasons:

1) Can't really develop on a PDA. Got *full* compilers for Java, C++, C#, etc.? Nope. [1]

2) Keyboard. Do I really want to write code on the Zaurus' small keyboard - or worse, via handwriting recognition or the on-screen software keyboard? No way. Emails, short (less than 1000 words) messages, sure, but code? No. That said, the Zaurus 6000's USB host capability means I could plug in a USB keyboard and use that instead. That would help alleviate the problem quite a bit IMO.

The above ignores the problem of PDAs having a necessarily-small screen size. My Visor can only display about 10 lines of text at a time, though maybe the Zaurus is better here... But my laptop, at 1024x768 res. can display about 35 lines (the more code on screen without needing to squint, the better of course).

PDAs are great for what they're designed for - storing and displaying contact info, notes, books, etc., but for serious computing (i.e. that which requires lots of user input, CPU-usage, storage space, etc.), unfortunately we're not quite up to laptop levels yet, even if something like the Zaurus' USB host feature allows connecting to external HDDs...

I have to admit though, the USB host capability theoretically offers a *lot* of potential for expansion, and I think that's probably a slightly-underplayed advantage of the Zaurus 6000...

[1] I know GCC has been ported to the Zaurus, and if you have a CF or SD card to run it off of, you can actually do your compiles on the Zaurus. Admittedly, that's pretty close to what I'd like to do. And Perl is available for the Zaurus too, albeit, at a hefty 34MB (again, need a CF or SD card). But again, what about Java? I think the best one could do is to use gcj, which AFAIK is not really a serious alternative to the Sun or Blackdown javac's...

And then there's the mere 400MHz CPU speed vs. my laptop's 2.4GHz, although, running distcc (if you have network access to distcc-running systems) would help immensely... :)

My $0.02.

Why would one want OGGs anyway?

• I haven't paid for an MP3 encoder, and I'm not going to play that game. (Yes, Thompson/Fraunhofer could theoretically pull a patent out of their portfolio that affects Vorbis, but they haven't yet)
• Foobar2000 and Opie-Player 2 are the players I use.

Like the Zaurus does?.

I have Snes9X running on my Zaurus 860 now... FFIII, Zelda, Chrono Trigger, Super Mario World, all the great games run just like they do on the console. You can get it for your Zaurus here. Also available are NES, GameBoy/GBA, Genesis, MAME, Atari 400/800/XE and even a Scumm emu for Monkey Island, The Dig, etc. After all, it does run linux and a lot of apps can be ported to run on it. Check out the Zaurus Software Index for more cool stuff.

What I want is a little handheld computer that runs Mac OS 6. It wouldn't be that hard to do and you have a literal ocean of abandonware out there you could use with such a device.

Merry Christmas

All you really want is decent note taking right? Instead of a $3,000 POS, get a decent PalmOS PDA and a Stoaway folding keyboard.

I've been using my zaurus 5500 with a stowaway irda kb for a while. The driver is reasonably stable and unobtrusive. The combination works _very_ well for on-the-go text entry. I certainly wish I'd had something similar when I was in school a decade ago.

The complaints about the Zaurus' PIM apps are well-known and widely-circulated, but just in the 6 months I've had my Zaurus the situation has improved greatly. The Sharp 3.x ROMs have updated apps, but what I've found most useful is korganizer, which obviously syncs flawlessly with korganizer on the desktop (where I was running KDE anyway). That works great for me; I realise others have different needs but there are options out there; the PIM section on the website in the link above has 83 packages.

(This message was posted from a Zaurus, fwiw.)

Why is this a flamebait ?
I coded 2 Qtopia apps, "ZooZ" and "Wine(!)", and I sure know Qt as well as my fellow KDE-ers.
I *love* the API : it is really nice to code.
But I am not the average Joe 6pack, hence my comment.

How does this make the above a flamebait ?

Why is this a flamebait ?
I coded 2 Qtopia apps, "ZooZ" and "Wine(!)", and I sure know Qt as well as my fellow KDE-ers.
I *love* the API : it is really nice to code.
But I am not the average Joe 6pack, hence my comment.

How does this make the above a flamebait ?

Although it's currently in B, the Opie Player 2 does this on OpenZaurus with a minimum of problems... But a caveat: there are search problems. It is, however, worth giving a whirl for any Zaurus user.

Opie Player 2 (op)

The new Opie mediaplayer. Does, mp3, shoutcast, ogg/vorbis, ogg streaming, mpg1, mpg2, divx3, divx4, divx5,XviD, mpeg4, wav. More to come. Still consumes a lot of memory. Make sure you have libopie and the codecs also installed. Since the 2.4.6 on zaurus also has some memory problems in the kernel, you might want to reboot the zaurus if you see problems with playback. New version, improved playback in nonfullscreen video mode. Also the ipk for the retail rom are now installable, but use the command line ipkg. The gui frontend does not find the ipk. Note: You also need zlib, both that and libopie_0.9.1 can be downloaded from - here !

Source

When I play oggs, I use vorbis-plugin for the stock media player. However, outside of that, I use xmms-e for streaming audio, since I'm usually plugged in when I'm using wifi. Meh.

That's why I wish there were more emulators for the Sharp Zaurus. The built-in keyboard makes a huge difference, and would be perfect for playing the old Ultima games!

How many more do you want? There are loads of them.

Atari 400/800, PC, Atari ST, C64, Gameboy (orig/color/Advance), Mac, PalmPilot, MAME, MESS, ScummVM, SNES, TRS-80, Genesis, NES, Spectrum, TI85, Wonderswan, Amiga. If they're not at the link above then do a search of some Japanese zaurus sites.

Texas Instruments Ti85 emulator

I too have a Zaurus SL-5500, which is quite capable of running various games processor-wise, but I find the buttons, being designed for PDA navigational use, are not well suited for gaming. I've compared Super Mario Brothers 2 on my Zaurus under ZFCEU to a friend's GBA running the same game, and the GBA just plays better. Even though the buttons are similar in placement and number, they just weren't well engineered for gaming.

As for Doom, congratulations! I use it to show off the Zaurus processing and graphics abilities, but never bothered playing much due to a lack of buttons to assign for strafe, etc... What did you do in the keymapping to make it playable with one hand?

Of course, others have noted similar problems on other PDAs, and there exist gamepad clip-ons for iPaqs now.

Here is Yet Another Example (YAE) of playing games on a PDA: I'm the proud owner of the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500, and I've finished ID's Doom and Lucas Art's Monkey Island I (using ScummVM ported for the Zaurus) on my PDA. Just take a look at the Zaurus Software Index to see which games are available. So yes, I think PDAs are growing more and more into gaming platforms, keep an eye on them. Ow, and besides gaming, you can do a lot other things with PDAs, which you can't with GBAs and others.

I have a SL-5500 for about two months. I also have but no longer use a VR3. I also am a technical support rep for one of the major Palm OS pda manufacturers.

The Zaurus is great. It is reasonably fast. I run the majority of the Apps off the SD card, so that slows things do a bit. If you make use the ram drive, as it is setup in the default Sharp ROM, it is very fast to run off the ram drive.

There is a fair amount of software and one can also make use of Java apps. Besides the PIM apps, I primarily use it as an ebook read and a check book. For those that are interested The Kompany makes several apps for the zaurus including Kapital, a Quicken like program. the Zaurus Software Index should give a good idea of what is available.

The screen is a reflective tft so it is fully usable in Bright light including sunlight. The battery will last a couple of days with normal use, much like any pocket PC device. There is also a NiCAD backup battery, though you will need to suspend the device before you lose total battery. If you do not save to the Ram drive, then everything will be restore if you lose all power as it will be saved to either internal flash, SD, of CF.

The buttons are reconfigurable, and if held for a sec or two have another function. I have sucessfully beamed between a VR3, PEGSJ20, Visor, Ipaq, and a Palm V. I have synced on both Win2k and Mandrake Linux 9.1-9.2.

Oh and the media player works nicely. The sound through the headphones is great. The built in speaker is a crappy piezo though. I personally prefer using the embedded XMMS, but there are several options.

I ordered this and was wondering the same thing, so I did some googling.

Here's a couple web sites I found:

Zaurus Software Index

Open Zaurus

It lacks operators, seriously : when I had to develop my cellar for Qtopia, it saved me a huge time and code ergonomy to just use some operator to add new records to my db...

Ever heard about the Sharp Zaurus? The Zaurus series have Linux pre-installed. I own a SL-5500, and I'm really glad with it. I can do everything on it what I can do on PocketPC (including Word and Excell) + much and much more. Take a look at the Zaurus Software Index to see it for yourself.

- rastakid

apache / php for the Zaurus

:-)

All from the Zaurus Software Index

Google is your friend.

Wireless LAN Monitor

Wellenreiter II

Kismet

Kismet w/GUI

Discoverer

ZNetMeter

WirelessApplet

If you's like more research done, let's discuss hourly rates. ;)

Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 8.9).

All from the Zaurus Software Index

Google is your friend.

Wireless LAN Monitor

Wellenreiter II

Kismet

Kismet w/GUI

Discoverer

ZNetMeter

WirelessApplet

If you's like more research done, let's discuss hourly rates. ;)

Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 8.9).

All from the Zaurus Software Index

Google is your friend.

Wireless LAN Monitor

Wellenreiter II

Kismet

Kismet w/GUI

Discoverer

ZNetMeter

WirelessApplet

If you's like more research done, let's discuss hourly rates. ;)

Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 8.9).

All from the Zaurus Software Index

Google is your friend.

Wireless LAN Monitor

Wellenreiter II

Kismet

Kismet w/GUI

Discoverer

ZNetMeter

WirelessApplet

If you's like more research done, let's discuss hourly rates. ;)

Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 8.9).

All from the Zaurus Software Index

Google is your friend.

Wireless LAN Monitor

Wellenreiter II

Kismet

Kismet w/GUI

Discoverer

ZNetMeter

WirelessApplet

If you's like more research done, let's discuss hourly rates. ;)

Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 8.9).

All from the Zaurus Software Index

Google is your friend.

Wireless LAN Monitor

Wellenreiter II

Kismet

Kismet w/GUI

Discoverer

ZNetMeter

WirelessApplet

If you's like more research done, let's discuss hourly rates. ;)

Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 8.9).

All from the Zaurus Software Index

Google is your friend.

Wireless LAN Monitor

Wellenreiter II

Kismet

Kismet w/GUI

Discoverer

ZNetMeter

WirelessApplet

If you's like more research done, let's discuss hourly rates. ;)

Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 8.9).

All from the Zaurus Software Index

Google is your friend.

Wireless LAN Monitor

Wellenreiter II

Kismet

Kismet w/GUI

Discoverer

ZNetMeter

WirelessApplet

If you's like more research done, let's discuss hourly rates. ;)

Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 8.9).

killefiz and openzaurus, OZ seems to be a nice "distribution", but I may be trying out debian on it soon.

If you want industrial-strength problem solving, check this out: clisp+maxima+zaurus. See also qplot.

The reviewer does like the Yopy, but for an expected retail price of $499, you could get a Zaurus SL-5600 that has essentially all the same functionality, with a better processor (400MHz XScale as opposed to the older 206MHz). Granted, the 5600 only has 96MB RAM, but since they both have expansion slots, that's not really an issue.

Also, the Zaurus already has a large developer community, and has drivers for things like wireless cards, and has plenty of software.

I certainly don't want to see Yopy fail (competition is generally good, and having more Linux PDAs is good), but IMHO they should be offering a little more if they want to be competitive.

Yes it Can, see :)

The ability to bash/sftp your data to/from your desktop? = PRICELESS
Not having evil bill's EULA in your PDA? = PRICELESS
Being able to play KBILL on your PDA? = PRICELESS
The pure oldschool joy of NETHACK on your PDA? = PRICELESS