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Review Of The Sharp Zaurus 5000D
Tim_F writes: "Palmstation has a nice review of the recently available development release of the Sharp Zaurus 5000D. This device looks sweet, with QT Embedded, and Lineo Embeddix. It also features a full JVM based on JDK 1.1.8." Any readers out there who have managed to try one of these out as well?
Holy rusted metal batman! Okay so I'm lame, get over it you hosers. Really, go away. Please.
This sharp PDA is an excellent idea, but it is just another PDA being relased to the general population, and PDA sales aren't skyrocketing by any means. I think it will just be absorbed like a lot of ther good ideas these days.
AJ
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artlu.net
Here is a pretty cool demonstration of the product. Interactive, flashy kind of thing.
I haven't done much on embedded java, so would anyone please tell me why shipping with a ages-old JVM is a good idea? Especially since JDK 1.4 will be out around the same time (or a bit later than) the device's debut.
With QT embedded we should have quite a few programs ported over to that pretty quickly, especially since it uses Linux. Some of KDE's flashyness would probably go over nicely. Some of KDE's programs will probably go over nicely, for that matter....
PDAs are pointless expensive electronics. You can do almost anything they can with a notebook, daily organizer, and a calculator. It's a lot cheaper.
I own one of these little puppies and I am happy to say it rocks. Tons of kde apps are already ported to Qt embedded, you can hack this thing to run X, and most importantly it is as good as any palm/pocket pc and keeping you orgranized.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
"I don't want to turn this into a device review - that will come later" -- Good job guys.
"I don't want to turn this into a device review - that will come later "
IDIOT!
I have owned a few Palms in my day, and all of them have ended up being ignored for the most part. The trouble with them is that if I'm in my car making appointments on my cell phone, there's no way I can spend 5 minutes using graffiti, etc. to enter a new appointment. It just isn't convenient enough for me. So, until they have a voice recognition system that allows me to add a contact, and schedule a meeting with them by uttering a few simple words, I'll stick with my pen and paper.
It's not full blown JDK...it's Personal Java, which is a subset.
It's a sweet little machine. I have spent all of 5 minutes playing with it as the day job is insane these days.
:)
I love the keyboard, and I love the size of the thing. A few things stick out as sore thumbs. One is that it needs some sort of carrying case. I guess I'll see if I can find one from a CE or Palm that it would fit nicely in.
Another is that while it attempts to do hand writing recognition, it's brain dead at it. Sure the keyboard is there, but I find it quicker to write on the screen being used to my Newton 2100. Would be nice if it had Graffitti (not sure it doesn't) or the ability to write text on the screen.
When you do HWR, you have to switch modes (a UI design no-no) and it splits your screen into two areas, one into which you write. Once it recognizes your handwriting - and it never does, it pastes the text into the currently open application. In other words, it's brain dead.
This would be a great area for improvement.
I totally love the color screen. The size and clarity of the display would be perfect for reading text, playing games (porting MAME would be awesome), and with the camera attachment - taking pix.
It would be really sweet if I could attach a small hard drive to this, like one of those IBM microdriver in some sort of backpack/cradle - then I could use it to see short mpegs, have some real mp3 storage, etc.
That it has an mp3 player is awesome, but CF and the secure flash lots limit how much you can store, so I won't be using this as my mp3.
Another annoyance is I find is that it doesn't fit very well into the cradle. You have to wiggle it a bit, and I'm afraid of breaking the connector...
It looks very promising though.
For a Linux PDA, it doesn't like the linux browsers (ie Galeon). It does like Netscape though. It's funny as they're built off the same base.
If Sharp are hoping to sell this primarily to the linux market, then surely they should allow their website to be viewed with any browser!!
It has a number of nice features for this application:
Adding a single PCMCIA slot and wireless card to an iPaq increases the cost to $850/unit and yields a device with no free slots, but 802.11b networking.
Adding a wireless card to this Zaurus yields a device with networking and one free slot (an SD slot) for $500. Plus, its noticeable smaller and lighter, and much easier to hold for a long time. Only problem so far: the 802.11b card blocks the stylus slot.
Now we just need apps! apps! apps! so that Sharp will ship this thing retail and sell them at best buy. It includes all the usual stuff - address book, calendar, todo list, email (pop/smtp), etc. Also includes games, like asteroids (everyone in my office found the asteroids game almost immediately). It just needs "fit and finish."
Sync over 802.11b would be a nice trick. Currently it uses Intellisync over USB, using 192.168.1.200 and 192.168.1.201 as the unit and host addresses for its private network. It would seem that a major corporate nice-thing would be to have a sync server for the Zaurus, so that employees could just walk near an access point and get things synced.
Anyway, it's easily the nicest PDA I've seen, and held.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
If you push the battery up the puppie's ass, the battery is good for just over an inch.
In my opinion, is a WINE for WinCE... If it had that, I'd buy one in a second.
.NET comes out, you'll have a lot of WinCE applications that are just an extension of what you have on your desktop (I've heard some about what you will be able to do, and it will be damned neat for anyone who doesn't have a vendetta against Microsoft). For example, I have a friend who has an iPAQ with a wireless card in it, and he can use Terminal Services to TS to his main workstation while he's in a meeting, monitor his build progress, change a few things and recompile, and a bunch of other things. It's really quite neat.
As for the people who are saying that it's so easy to program, have you ever done any windows programming? I find it a *lot* easier to do programming for WinCE/Windows using any of the nice RAD tools that you can get, and I don't see so much in the way of linux, but I could be wrong.
I am absolutely in love with the keyboard, as I had a Rim pager for a while and absolutely loved that keyboard. It took a bit of getting used to, but it was so much nicer than using a stylus.
The only thing that I'm worried about for these devices is the "quirks" that are so typically linux. I've used linux a lot, and it works great, that is provided that nothing goes wrong. As soon as anything goes wrong you require a lot more knowledge than the average CS person to get it working again, and there are also a lot more applications out there for WinCE than there are for Linux. Add to that when
Let the flaming begin, but if WinCE was available for this device then I'd definitely wait for it to roll out before buying a new PDA. But at this point in time I've heard too many complaints about using embedded linux (if you have any comments, no flames please, but I'd be glad to hear rational comments) and my personal experience with desktop linux hasn't been fantastic either. The last time I tried it the default install wouldn't work on either my old or my new laptop, and I still have yet to be able to recompile the kernel on my old laptop without it doing a kernel panic on boot.
In any case, just my opinion.
If God gave us curiosity
I just got my Zaurus in the mail on Thursday, and I have to say that it was worth it. The demo unit is a bit unrefined, but at least it doesn't crash nearly as often as my old Windows CE 2.0 device (a clunky old Jornada). Audio playback is OK, but I just really love how it runs Linux. Not having to pay the Palm or Microsoft tax is quite liberating, I must say.
Unfortunately, I couldn't make it to the conference due to some work obligations. However, I'm already in the process of coding some (GPL, naturally) applications for the Zaurus, including a web browser, a small game where you have to clobber Bill Gates (think xbill, but for Qt), and a text editor.
/me loves his new toy.
For more information, click here.
It's interesting to note that the specifications state that there is no 'copyright protection' on the SD slot. I never really understood why manufacturers ever included the 'feature' since it would have to be turning off lots of customers, including those not into copying but forseeing hassles just doing what the have a right to.
Hopefully this and other copy protection features will be weeded out by natrual selection.
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
That PDA is a very nice piece of technology, but most interested people won't buy it at all, and I'm one of these. It's price is way too high compared to what the device is: too big for a PDA, too limited for a laptop.
At this price you get a complete laptop, or fill all your pockets with smaller PDAs.
Certain folks in Cupertino can't be happy about this. Java doesn't seem to be winning much acceptance in hand-held application development. Given the failure of Java in other markets, the technology seems to be limited to writing business logic for app servers and hacking out specialized XML editors and filters.
For Gods sake man, cut those nails!
http://www.interpug.com/palmstation/sharp4.JPG
Thats just freakin' gross.
As an open source developer, why would I want to develop for an embedded toolkit that almost nobody uses? A toolkit that's put out in this form as an advertising gimmick by a software company? A toolkit that takes over the screen and excludes all other open source GUI software?
And as a commercial developer, why would I want to develop for a toolkit that's more expensive than an MSDN subscription and is used on almost no platforms?
Sharp shot themselves in the foot when they picked Lineo and Qt/Embedded--there is no way this is going to attract a large developer following. They should have gone with X11/FLTK on Familiar or something combo like that. It's too bad, too, because the hardware is really nice.
The specs seem 'giant' compared to other PDA's? Am I reading this wrong? What's your take on it compared to say a Palm 500/505?
Thanks.
The dead have risen, and they're reviewing handhelds! AAAHHHHHHH!!!!
The Free desktop that Just Works
Overall, it's a very neat little device. Since it is only a developer's version, it still has its few kinks to work out. But I won't be buying another PDA for a good long time.
libertarianswag.com
tell me why shipping with a ages-old JVM is a good idea?
1) Stability of the product.
In the 'internet time', no one seems to care about quality. Because they have this idea, just ship a new patched version.
2) Testing. (which ties into one)
Back in the day when people gave a damn about quality, they tested stuff. Given you don't have the background in testing, it makes EVERYONE's life hard when you are testing YOUR code, and you keep moving the underlying code your code uses. Where is the problem when YOUR App breaks?
Not everyone writes java for some porn site, where the program is ripped off from anohter porn site, your contribution is 10 lines of code, and the deletion of someone else's copyright, and the update doesn't break other people's work.
Here's my review of the Sharp Zaurus. Maybe it sucks, and that's why it wasn't published as a Slashdot story? Anyway, you can read it for yourself.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I have a friend with another sharp pda and it can be made to sync with his Mac. Anyone know if this will sync with anything but windows and linux? Hell i can sync my newton with my g4, and its old as hell, so i hope this does as well.
programming for WinCE/Windows using any of the nice RAD tools that you can get, and I don't see so much in the way of linux
Since the Zaurus runs Java, you can use any number of Java RAD IDEs today to write your code. Forte and Visual Age are two free ones that come to mind.
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Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Infosync also have a eview on this PDA, it has some hi-res pictures too. http://www.infosync.no/show.php?id=1162&page=1
kawai
I'm not sure if it would work on one of these devices, but you can use a Windows Terminal Server using RDesktop. I've been using it at work, and it works surprisingly well--I haven't had any problems at all.
http://insomedia.com/comdex/pages/Pb160049_jpg.htm
http://www.flashenabled.com/mobile
this site had great coverage
"Doctor Zaurus!"
"Doctor Zaurus!"
Perfect marketing campaign.
Hey, My roomate has the japanese equivalent, the Zaurus MI-E1 which has been out in japan for over a year now. He was over there last winter. He has all sorts of attachments for it including the Compact flash digital camera. This device is pretty amazing, the japanese one has an SH processor and runs ZaurusOS but it's very very sweet. Full screen mpeg4 video is not a problem for it. It's very fast, and this american one should be faster and a lot more amazing. These things put Ipaq's to shame, trust me ;)
I got mine on Monday. It's now sunday, and I can now upload emacs to it.
geeky little thing. this device was meant to be wireless.
Alot has been said about the headphone jack vs. speaker. I can't really understand this. Did a walkman have a speaker? The Zaurus can output 44.1/16 bit audio, and your never going to get that from a little tiny pda speaker. I applaud their decision to do that.
It has a speaker for beeps, congks and groans, anyway.
The keyboard is a nice feature. Not at all difficult to peck out messages and letters fairly fast.
and handwriting terminal commands is really bizaar!!! well worth the price paid!!
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
Seems huge to me. The "review" had a comparison picture with the Sharp and a Handera. The Handera is about as big as a Palm III or Visor. The Zaurus was a bit thicker, and at least an inch longer with the keyboard closed. The Newtons had a problem with size, and I think this this will too.
The device runs Lineo and Qt/Embedded. Is Lineo completely open source or are there proprietary components? Can I recompile every binary on it from scratch? Is the screen buffer driver code in its version of Qt/Embedded open source (so that one can port X11 to it)?
I just got back from the LISA '01 conference and there was a guy (can't remember his name...) that had a SHARP there. He had received it on Thursday before the conference and was showing it off at the Linux on Handhelds BOF.
I got a chance to use it and it was quite nifty. The thumb keyboard is very usable. I opened a terminal window and was able to type in a few stock UNIX commands, no problems. The keyboard's main problem was a lack of control keys and the escape key. They may be there with some funny mapping, but I couldn't find them in the few minutes I had to play with the device.
The other impression I got was how well built the device is. It's much stronger than it looks and the slide that hides the keyboard has a nice solid feel to it.
I'm planning on ordering one in the next few days...
A PDA can hold books, documentation, specialized application software, personal notes, appointments, and play calculator- all of which will take up vastly less space than the notebook, daily organizer, and calculator. If you can afford one, it's NOT pointless. If not, well, you CAN fall back to what you suggest.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
"Mmm... ugly, non-portable, AND obscure. A winning combo. QT can at least be used on Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, etc. :)"
FLTK can be used on Windows, MacOS, Linux (and anything running X11...). As for "ugly"- that'd be the default UI look and feel. You can produce NICE looking UI code with FLTK (Witness "Post Office", a mail program using FLTK as the GUI lib (http://www.tarball.net/postoffice)- it looks as polished as many commercial products.) and the default UI look and feel is about to get an update with the 2.0 release that is currently in development.
Don't get me wrong, Qt is nice. Qt, however, is much, much larger (even with Qt Embedded) than FLTK (2 or so Mb versus 200-400k for FLTK!) and requires special pre-processors to make the code go.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
These are only dev versions. They have less memory than the final versions will have (32/64). And the software is also far from complete.
Do note that because it is CF2 compatible it WILL support the microdrive.
But I find Sun's strategy in this area to be a little confused. On the one hand, they're EOLing Java 1.1.x. On the other hand they're still using it as a basis for PersonalJava with "possible inclusion" of Java 2 features. My guess (by percentages, I'll get one right eventually) is that they'd like all the handheld developers to migrate to J2ME, but are having trouble convincing people.
This sort of nonsensical Microsoft propaganda has no place on /. - yet it's frequency is increasing.
I don't want to wade through bullshit posts that have been bought and paid for by Redmond, please censor them or provide me with the ability to filter out this noise.
WOW, someone has to tell our reviewer to trim his hist finger nails... weird.
I don't want to run a GPL-infected operating system. I wonder how easy it is to run NetBSD
on it.
http://jeffsutherland.org/oopsla98/squeak98.html
You can find the Squeak Zaurus port and the Squeak IPaq port on http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/458
You can find general information about Squeak (a dialect of SmallTalk-80) at http://www.squeak.org
Enjoy!
Stephan
when the first 100 posts aren't concerned with how to flash the thing to make it run something else.
On a more serious note, I can't wait until Evolution and Outlook will natively support synching over IP.
I was one of the lucky few invited to the Symposium they held the day before the Internet World Wireless West conference in San Jose last week (many, was that place desserted! - and, not too surprisingly, Sharp's booth was by far the kick-ass-est). (Not doubt because of all of the random Linux development I've done, including stuff for the Agenda (another Linux-based PDA).
As for the hardware, it's quite sturdy (compared to my poor, beat up dev. edition of the Agenda), and the keyboard is a godsend. (I knew I'd love it, because I have a pager with a similar keyboard, and love it.) Now - the onscreen keyboard, pickboard, unicode and handwriting aren't to sneeze at, though. They're quite useful!
It's just, when you whip out your PDA, turn it on to show off its color screen, and then pop out the keyboard, THAT's when people's eyes bug out. ;^)
Anyway.. I love it. Expect plenty of games for it from me once I get my USB, development environment, etc. set up. (Oh, and learn Qt and that damned C++ language.)
Qt is still being released under the GPL to generate business for Qt from commercial customers. You may think that arrangement is pretty swell, I think it will ultimately kill Linux on handhelds if any commercial developer has to pay thousands of dollars before being able to create GUI software for something like the Sharp.
/can/ get Swing) is just too much of a pig. Still, you really want the widgets ... and Qt has 'em and they're tight and fast like you wish Swing would be.
Actually, buying the development unit entitles you to the development software. Even if that weren't the case, though, it's pretty much the same place you're standing if you were developing for PalmOS or WinCE/PPC. Somebody here was saying that QPE was more money than MSDN. Uh, have you received your MSDN bill recently? Sure, if you're getting the docs only subscription it's still relatively cheap, but if you want those compilers you better cough up a lung.
The best part about MSDN, for me, was sitting there opening my mail and watching the news and hearing that Microsoft had told the judge that they weren't a price-gouging monopoly. I opened my MSDN renewal invoice and in the span of one year the price had jumped 40%. That was the year that the last of the competitive Windows development tools producers gave up....
As a developer I am not especially turned off by the fact that the whole thing isn't open source. It's more important that it be open information. This tool is the most open of any of the palm devices I've seen; anyone with any Linux or UNIX experience at all is going to be able to make this thing do backflips.
Lots of people have been wondering where the market will be for this device, since Linux people are such a small market in and of themselves. I don't see that being the issue at all. We're the seed market, but the real market going out the door is going to be integrators and vertical market apps people. Java and superb 802.11b support? Damn, in a couple of weeks I could deploy this thing as a handheld database access tool with a custom application. And this can be done for about $600/unit ($100 less for the preproduction units). You can't touch the extensibility with the Palms and you can't touch the price with the PPCs.
And that, my friends, is going to sell units -- even if they don't do anything to the unit at all by the time it ships.
If there's any one thing I'd like to see, though, it would be Qt bindings for the Java interpreter. AWT sucks, and Swing (you
It's a very interesting unit.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
It won't sync with MacOS out of the box. In fact, it won't sync with Linux out of the box. The software only runs on Win9x/ME/2K ... not even WinXP (though the latter will almost certainly be corrected rapidly).
If there's one thing that this box needs, it's improved sync support. The default system uses an IP-based scheme with predefined addresses that conflict with many small networks. That's easily fixable by editing some files and making a configuration change on the Windows box, but it shouldn't have been an issue at all. The cradle is a bit touchy, and the Windows drivers -- if they work at all -- even moreso. There is no network sync support.
On the other hand, this thing is so programmable that it's no problem to develop your own sync program. I'm just using tar to a CF card right now, but it's a no-brainer to turn that into a network backup to some box via either PPP over USB , a CF ethernet card, or a CF 802.11 card. You can bet on a host of sync programs being out before this thing goes into consumer mode.
It's got its problems, but this is still the most mature pre-production developer system I've yet to use.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
OK, I guess Java is kind of popular out there, but not as much in the Linux community or open source communities.
I think Ruby would be an excellent choice of programming languages for this thing. Ruby:
*is small - less than 800K (can be made even smaller if you get rid of a few libraries that you may not need)
*is Free (as in Open Source)
*has Qt bindings
*is easy to write distributed apps in dRuby - this would especially be good if they can get a wireless link for this thing.
*has reasonable performance
*is (IMHO) a much nicer language to program in than Java.
How about it Sharp?
I've been using my Zaurus with a 340MB Microdrive and it works just fine, I dont see any reason why the 1GB wont work too, since they both work the same under Linux on my laptop (just haven't gotten around to trying the 1GB one in the Zaurus yet).
I own a Sharp Zaurus that I bought back in 1991 over in Japan. It, of course, wasn't Linux/QT/Java based, but it was an excellent PDA (until my kids were born). I hope Sharp can release this new Zaurus with the same level of quality that their old ones were.
I am very interested in the Sharp PDA, but I need to make sure my $400 will not be wasted. I am a developer with Sharp, so I can get one now, but I have heard (or read) that the memory Sharp advertises that the sl5000d will have is not what developers get. If I order and get one now, will I get less RAM, and if so how much? I am very anxious to get it (it is just so darn sexy), but I need to know if waiting until the retail, public version is worth it. Thanks.