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MSNBC Reviews the Sharp Zaurus
Khalid sent in a link to this review of the Sharp Zaurus. They only noted a few flaws, such as the synchronization being harder than necessary, and generally seemed to like it, at least better than the Wall Street Journal columnist did.
Someone here doubted Walter Mossberg's inegrity. Sorry, it holds.
This is a brief excerpt from his previous review of StarOffice (also found at wsj):
"As for ease of use, the StarOffice interface is OK. There are customizable toolbars at both the top and side of the screen, and floating windows to help you navigate a long document or apply formatting styles. There's even a nice feature Word lacks that allows the program to automatically complete words you've used before.
But StarOffice is riddled with extra steps, complex techno-babble and odd behavior. When you first fire up the word processor, you're asked to select an "address data source," which means an address book the program can use to insert addresses -- hardly a daily function. And the choices include "LDAP," a techie term referring to network or online address databases.
Options screens include mind-boggling choices like "memory per object" and "Use OpenGL." My favorite: "size optimization for XML format (no pretty printing)." In my copy, the default settings were set to use centimeters and German, instead of inches and English.
Many things are unnecessarily complicated. For instance, in Microsoft Word, if you want to insert page numbers in a document, you just go to the "insert" menu, select "page numbers," choose where you want them on the page and how you want them aligned, and you're done. In StarOffice, you have to know a page number is a "field" and then, when you find the proper command in the insert menu under "fields," the program just inserts the phrase "page numbers" wherever your cursor is, unless you manually created a header or footer.
Some features worked erratically. Entire toolbars sometimes disappeared for reasons I couldn't deduce. The spell-checker sometimes didn't work."
I just bought mine last week at Best Buy, only $250 bucks!!!! They were on clearance and I got their demo model. Not a shabby deal. I absolutly love it. I am planning on flashing OpenZaurus this weekend. Its good to see the Linux PDA marekt getting a little pub!
peace...
"Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty..."
What good is a Linux PDA that doesn't sync with Linux desktops? Form the FAQ: What operating systems is the Zaurus SL-5500 synchronisation software compatible with? The Zaurus SL-5500 synchronisation software is compatible with Microsoft® Windows® 98, 98SE, Millennium, 2000 Professional, XP and NT 4.0 with SP6.
1. You can run a gameboy emulator on the Zarus.
3. You don't really need wireless access in the Alaskan wilderness. There are providers who will definately cover you almost everywhere you'll really go.
Think of the Zaurus as a mixture of a PDA and a Palmtop(think toshiba Liberetto). You get the basic functionality you need out of a PDA... instant on, PIM functions, ect... You also get most of the full feature applications you want. Supposedly because it uses Linux many applications whould only require a simple recompile. I havn't found it that easy, but everything I need has already been ported. I used to carry a palm for phone numbers and a datebook, along with a laptop for divx and connecting to my companies network. Now I use Zaurus' built in PIM and installed The Kompany's video player as well as a terminal emulator for work. Its great.
Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
Personally, I am just waiting for the next generation of Nokia Communicator, it has no bells and whistles, but the concept works, thecurrent generation already, after the bug fixes, does the job rather well, but lacks resources and bandwidth.
There are free players also! Go to www.zauruszone.com -> forums
Why sync? Why not just use wireless LAN / bluetooth->mobilephone->3G/GPRS->Internet , and access an online calendar, todolist, email, etc.. No need for sync in a perfect world!
And regarding games; Since it runs linux and is open source, lots of people have developed games for it. Ex: Doom, Quake, FreeCiv (Civilization clone), scummVM (enables you to run monkey island 1&2, fate of atlantis, day of the tentacle, full throttle, sam & max, etc), and many many more.
Check out: http://killefiz.de/zaurus/ (under ex. "Games" there are 75(!) games)
The problem with the Zaurus for many people is that Sharp is blatantly trying to rip them off.
The Sharp is reasonably priced at $380, but for us ( Europeans ) it costs $580 ! ( ex tax )
This is not free-market economics - it is exploitation by cartels, and the EU has just legislated on car pricing.
It is time they did likewise with electronics.
Until then we can simply refuse to buy clearly overpriced goods.
IMHO Linux on a palmtop makes perfect sense as the palmtop market isn't as strongly under the Microsoft thumb as the desktop PC market. On a level playing field, where vendors must compete on price and features, not "how fast does it run Microsoft Office" the co-operative nature and free licencing of Linux should be a big strength.
I don't have a Zaurus, but Bluetooth has proved to be a good way to connect a Palm and an Ericsson T68 phone (running GPRS, a bit like CDMA2000 only slower, i.e. both are always-on packet based technologies). It's nice to be able to connect to the Internet without taking the phone out of my pocket. However, make sure you get a phone with recent firmware that can be re-flashed when necessary - my Nov 2001 vintage T68 frequently needs rebooting due to a flaky GPRS stack, and CDMA2000 stacks will probably be similar.
There are several Bluetooth stacks for Linux, and quite a few Bluetooth CF cards, so I would expect that this is feasible on the Zaurus (if not now, then soon). There is a GPRS HOWTO for Linux that can probably be adapted for CDMA2000 - if the latter works like GPRS, you run a PPP connection from the Linux system to the phone, which terminates the PPP there and then routes packets over GPRS/CDMA2000. With GPRS, you have an IP tunnel that stays up, so you keep the same IP address, albeit dynamically allocated, as you move between cells - the tunnel is re-built as you move from one local GPRS node (SGSN) to another.
CDMA2000 has a simpler architecture that may not need all this tunnelling (IIRC) and is more IP centric. It probably has a session concept, like GPRS, in that the wireless operator needs to authenticate you for billing purposes - but you just pay for bytes transferred, not for the time the session is open.
One thing to watch out for is that the PPP session, and hence the CDMA2000 session, is kept open when you turn the Zaurus off - Palm devices are stuck in the 2G world at present and disconnect the PPP & GPRS sessions for no good reason when you hit the Power button. Apparently Pocket PC devices do this better, which makes much more sense for GPRS/CDMA2000 - creating a GPRS session can take 10-15 seconds and sometimes fails, whereas sending a packet on an open session should take less than a second (takes a bit of time to acquire radio medium for the first packet in a while, subsequent packets are faster).
Hopefully some of this is useful background. Linux is probably a great platform for this sort of thing, because it is so open to tweaking and experimentation, and of course has a lot of IP applications already ported. Don't expect to run servers though - all GPRS phones are behind NAT devices due to the sheer volume of always-on users. At least until we get IPv6, which is probably only with much later 3G releases (CDMA2000, and UMTS in Europe/Asia)...
Get em while they last! Make sure to get to the booth EARLY, cause at JavaOne this year we had 3-4 hour lines going around the BLOCK at Moscone.
For developing custom applications very quickly, the zaurus kicks booty, but it would be irresponsible to suggest to someone the zaurus as something you could use for phone numbers or schedules, no matter how many other cool features it has.
Note: Right now, the linux community is in hardcore denial about usability problems in general, and any attempt to deny the truth of this post only further proves the truth of it.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!