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

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.