Slashdot Mirror
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.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
The Zaurus in a (not so) near future should feature the new AmigaDE (DE=Digital Enviroment).
/.'ers know something more about this AmigaDE?
Something about it is avaiable at http://www.amiga.com, any of you
Andrea
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...
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
Freedom of Speech?
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.
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
I think InfoSync is running there webserver off a PDA.
I have been using a zaurus for about a month now..
It is nice to have a machine with robust networking built in as opposed to the M$ pocketpc which is so slow it isn't even funny.. The consumer version should be cleaner than the development version but hey when you can run a webserver from a PDA that is extremely cool.. I can see the future of truly useful PDA's in the enterprise and the future is Linux!!
*narf!*
found this site run by a Disney employee.
has some very detailed info.
enjoy!
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
Gotta say, thats a sharp looking little device.
"Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted."
-Fred Allen
Here's a link to Sharp's FAQ page about the Zaurus SL-5500.
It features a built-in hideaway keyboard (nice!), color screen, and a bunch of other goodies. Available "Early 2002".
I'm a 2000 man.
I know it's been mentioned here before, but I thought I'd jump in...
The Sharp Zaurus runs "Squeak", it's an open source programming language, it is a genuine, complete, compact, efficient Smalltalk-80 environment, you can read their licence here.
Check the
ZauChu homepage for more information on programming for the Zaurus.
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.)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
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.