InfoSync Reviews Sharp Zaurus

Bill Kendrick writes "infoSync has just posted a very well-rounded (and long) review of the Sharp Zaurus PDA. Get out the kleenex - you'll be drooling." Gotta say, thats a sharp looking little device.

Comments

zaurus

[Anonymous Coward]

great little device... i acquired one just last week, as i wanted to start doing linux dev work, and my ipaq (while a great little device) just doesn't have the linux support i wanted. the keyboard and integrated CF+SD slots make it a lot easier to carry around (being that it's more compact), and i'm finding myself using the ipaq less and less.
if anyone is looking for a pocket linux device, i highly recommend this one...

Looks nice but...

[iGawyn]

This wasn't a review, this was a marketing speech about how cool it is. It's an attractive looking PDA, however, they don't tell you much useful information, just gloss over the attractive features, throw some more bullshit at you, and then tell you where to buy it.

Just because a reviewer may like a product doesn't mean that he doesn't have a job to do, to review it in great detail, give the specifications for it, talk about good and bad points, and the like.

Gawyn

To any employee of Sharp ...

[TheViffer]

kudos to you for putting something like this out. It really is aimed right now toward the Slashdot geek power user who wants more toys .. you can never have enough I say.

But when I try to go to your web site and I see this bull shit message about how I need to download M$ Exploder to view your web pages, dont you think you have a CONFLICT of interest going here! Your running a product with a Linux kernel, but like hell if your going to get on our web pages if your running a Linux workstation running something like Mozilla or Opera.

Highly Informative User site

[bdavenport]

found this site run by a Disney employee.

has some very detailed info.

enjoy!

Re:Zaurus is the future of PDA's

[GroupCaptain]

I have to say it looks really cool, but after having used most PDAs since the first Apple Newton, cool doesn't make it a consumer product like the Palm. IMHO what makes it "consumer" is apps and synchronization. I am sure the apps will come, but I was dissapointed in the article because it talked nothing about synchronisation. What does it work with? At a minimum I would hope it does Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape, Eudora, (Mac and PC where applicable) and given it's pedigree, I would dearly hope Ximian's Evolution. But it has to do it better than their Palm connection, and people have to write conduits for Linux as well as apps for the Zarius. Does anyone have any info on the Zarius' connectivity?

Biggest Thing

[SomeOtherGuy]

I think this has the chance to be the biggest (* non data center related) Linux success to date. It appears to have everything going for it..I guess the proof will be not only "in the pudding"...but also in availability, cost, and support. I would like to see these things on the shelf in mass quantity very soon. Based on how low on surplus the chains were on certain PDA's this passed holiday season....and still....I would say yesterday would be a good time to market. It seems that the right combination of price and options is what gives these things life in the marketplace. (When HP dropped the price of their "low end" color Pocket PC to $199.00 they were VERY hard to find in the stores. -- people figured that was a sweet spot...Not many people will be willing to pay as much for their PDA's as they have to for a desktop machine.)

discards the major advantage of a Linux-based PDA

[markj02]

The major advantage of a Linux-based PDA is that it allows a huge amount of software to be ported quickly, and that it allows developers to use many different kinds of tools to develop for the PDA. What software and tools you say? All the stuff developed for the iPaq and AgendaVR3, all the stuff developed with cross-platform toolkits other than Qt, all the little WindowMaker apps, all the stuff developed for Windows (via compatibility libraries). Also, much of the X11 display code from big-screen apps can be reused on little screen devices, even if the GUI itself ends up having fewer buttons. X11-based displays also allow programmers to reuse their expertise and create new apps quickly.

Unfortunately, by using Qt/Embedded, the Zaurus partially loses that advantage: while you can muck around with VNC, in reality, the only apps any end user can run on it are Qt/Embedded apps--Qt takes over the screen. On the Zaurus, it's Qt or nothing. Software needs to be ported. Display code needs to be rewritten. Programmers who want to program the Zaurus must spend the time to learn it and use it and build new tools for it. While that isn't hard for an experienced programmer, it still is a lot of wasted time. Note that this is different from Qt on the desktop, where, through the magic of X11, Qt apps live happily side-by-side with other apps.

There is no real reason for this. If you download the Qt/Embedded and Qtopia demo and run it, you'll see that it uses up about 9Mbytes of RAM, considerably more than an X11 server and X11 apps running, say, on the AgendaVR3. And Troll Tech's own description of Qt/Embedded claims that its resource usage ("800k to 3M", depending on configuration) is comparable to that of an X11 server (which takes around 1M in a configuration suitable for handhelds).

What Sharp should do is create an X11 server for the device and recompile their Qt-based apps to use the X11 server. Then, the Sharp will be a standard Linux PDA. The way it is, the Sharp is, for practical purposes, a very slick looking but proprietary device. And that's not what Linux systems are supposed to be about.