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.

Comments

Re:Why linux on a pda?

[SuperCal]

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.

Re:Synchro software doesn't support Linux!

[Balazs]

The QTopiaDesktop software does exist for Linux, it's even free (beer). It can sync with the Zaurus over USB.
QTopiaDesktop HOWTO

Other option: You can use KDE's KOrganizer on the Zaurus and synchronize it over TCP-over-USB with the KOrganizer on your PC.
KOrganizer and sync scripts

Re:Any ideas / experience with Zaurus + 3G

[jukal]

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.

Re:Palm emulator for Zaurus?

[kroyd]

See http://killefiz.de/zaurus/showdetail.php?app=122 for a Palm emulator in full color and http://killefiz.de/zaurus/showdetail.php?app=236 for a more "retro" b/w version.

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.

Re:Any ideas / experience with Zaurus + 3G

[Cato]

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)...

Zaurus for $299 at LinuxWorld Expo at Sharp Booth

[perlow]

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.

Why zaurus kicks ass and why it sucks.

[Ilan Volow]

I got a zaurus about 3 months ago. In some ways, it really points out both the incredible strengths of linux PDA's and the incredible weaknesses.

• The really awesome thing about the zaurus is that you have the power to do things like create GUI based apps in python, which allows you to rapidly create useful mobile apps and not have to worry about things like memory management and cross compilation. It really takes the edge off of doing PDA development. I wrote a program to keep track of what I eat making use of python + xml + qt. There is no chance in hell I could have done that with a 33mhz dragonball.
  
  
• The problem with the zaurus is that there are very serious usability problems with the zaurus UI. Mossberg was absolutely 100% right when he said the zaurus is hard to use. Trolltech (with Qt embedded) and sharp (with their hardware design) has given absolutely no thought to making their products usable. Most of the glowing reviews of the zaurus interface you will see are given by entrenched techies who pride themselves on being to stumble their way through badly designed interfaces and decry anyone who finds a UI confusing or ambiguous as "not wanting to learn". Or they equate the zaurus' aesthetic beauty with usability (again, the "purty == usable" stupidity we see in so much Free Software these days). The reason why the Palm UI gets such a glowing review is that palm creator Jeff Hawkins designed the interface (both hardware-wise and software-wise) before he ever wrote a line of code or manufactured the hardware. He crafted a block of wood in the shape of the palm, whittled down a chopstick for a stylus, and carried the mockup around with him everywhere he went to ponder how the Palm UI should be designed. In the HCI world, we call this "preliminary task analysis", and it's obviously something that sharp and trolltech haven't done in the slightest. To read more about why the PalmOS UI still kicks the crap out of the zaurus UI, read the Zen of Palm and then try to find a document of equivalent enlightenment and quality relating to the zaurus.
  

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.