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

Sweet little machine

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:yes, the apps...

[1010011010]

A toolkit that's put out in this form as an advertising gimmick by a software company?

Actually, my spy network tells me that Sharp paid TrollTech to develop QPE.

toolkit that's more expensive than an MSDN

They will apparently be lowering the price.

They should have gone with X11/FLTK

Mmm... ugly, non-portable, AND obscure. A winning combo. QT can at least be used on Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, etc. :)

I do wonder if they (or someone else) will ship Wince for this thing at some point. Not that I want Wince.

I have one of these...

[bc90021]

And I've been using it for half a week now. Some things to note:

• The handwriting recognition isn't that bad. It requires you to train the device for certain characters if you want your own handwriting to work, but that doesn't take much time.
• IBM MicroDrives work with no problem. I have a 340MB version, and several other Zaurus owners have reported the 1GB version working. (Though they drain the battery quickly.)
• There are already tons of programs that have been ported. SSH, Telnet, Seminole Web Server, Jikes, Python, BitchX, Konqueror, NMap, and Perl to name just a few.
• The keyboard is really easy (and actually kinda fun) to use!
• The synching for Windows could use a little work, but it is a developer's model. Someone has already patched the 2.4.x kernels to allow USB networking over Linux in order to connect it to a Linux box, so it is now Linux friendly. :)
• The "Word Game" that comes with it (like Scrabble) has been very addicting!
• It is easily 80% of the size of a typical WinCE handheld, and includes two expansion slots (one CF and one SD) by default.

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.

Zauru

[mduckworth]

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 ;)

hmmmm

[Capt. Beyond]

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!!

Qt and cost of development

[jimfrost]

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.

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 /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.

It's a very interesting unit.

Re:Qt and cost of development

[jimfrost]

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.

If the proposition is "this is no worse than PalmOS or WinCE", that's not a particularly good one. I expect more from Linux, and not just technically.

I don't much buy into the theory that Linux ought to be an all-free-or-nothing proposition. If it is the case that I can get a better tool if I pay for it (and, historically, that has been very much the case) then I'm happy to pay for it.

This tool is the most open of any of the palm devices I've seen;

Perhaps you haven't seen much then. The Compaq iPaq runs full Linux with X11 and allows you to use whatever toolkit you like. The AgendaVR runs a full version of Linux and X11 as well. Availability of powerful handhelds running fully open Linux has not been a problem.

I don't count the iPAQ as an "open" palmtop because, when you pull it out of the package, it's proprietary all the way. Granted you can convert it, but I have a lot of better things to do with my time than doing that kind of thing, and I certainly have no intention of trying to sell palmtop software that's created for an iPAQ running Linux until Compaq sells them that way, hopefully for obvious reasons.

Even if you do, the iPAQ is a substantially larger and more expensive unit (at least if you want expansion capabilities). Cheap stuff wins.

anyone with any Linux or UNIX experience at all is going to be able to make this thing do backflips.

Well, no. A Java programmer can create Java applications for it, but a Java programmer can also create Java applications for Palm or WinCE. A C programmer can't write any GUI apps for it. And a C++ programmer has to learn a new toolkit and completely change the GUI code of their existing X11 applications.

Well, ok, some UNIX programmers will have to learn some new tricks to make it sing, but they ought to be fairly comfortable doing things with it.

Regarding rewriting GUI code for X11 applications, I would kind of expect that to do a good job for a palmtop application you're going to have to rework you UI to a significant degree anyway -- different form factor and input considerations usually means different design. The fact that Microsoft didn't want to do that has a lot to do with why WinCE sucked so much.

YMMV, of course, but this is unit has a lot of potential in my opinion. The fact that there are likely to be a lot of different handhelds running Linux doesn't change that, although it does make this one even more appealing to me as an early-adopter system.

I suppose how interesting this is, versus something like an iPAQ with Linux, has a lot to do with your goals. I don't want a device for personal hacking, I want a tool that makes it easy for me to build software I can sell.