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?

Comments

What it needs

[Telek]

In my opinion, is a WINE for WinCE... If it had that, I'd buy one in a second.

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 .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.

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.