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Zaurus 5600 Announced
numatrix writes "Sharp just announced the release of the SL-5600 Zaurus today, the followup to the SL-5500 linux pda. Features include an xscale 400mhz processor, 96mb total flash, higher capacity battery, 2.4.18 kernel, built in speaker and mic, and all of the best bits of goodness from the 5500.
Infosync has an article as well."
A $99 Palm can't play full motion video.
"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research." - Einstein
The hardware.
That is like saying "if linux is so free, why does a quad xeon machine running linux cost more than a 386 running linux?"
There simply IS no comparable palm model, however a comparison with the iPaq would be fair....
Finkployd
I a precedent message you ask everyone (inluding me) this question about the eighth wonder of the world ...
:-)
but it's a handheld... how fast does it need to be?
It's need to be as fast it can, I want to play a 6 hours movie compressed in a 1gig IBM mini harddrive in a plane trip between Montréal and Paris. So it need to be able to decompress the next divx or something like that on the fly (no kitting)
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
but it's a handheld... how fast does it need to be?
;-)
Well once the linux version of Doom 3 is released... need I say more?
All Your Memory Are Belong To Java
It would have been nice to see what the display actually looks like, not just screenshots pasted onto the photographs.
The most intesreting thing about this is that they are releasing another model. This must mean that they've made enough mondey from the previous model to justify it. Which must be a first for a Linux-based PDA. I have an Agenda, and while it was fun to play with for a while, it was way too slow to be useful. Obviously enough people think otherwise about the Zaurus.
>>includes a 1700 mAh high capacity battery ;)
>Perhaps they meant "Mega" here as well?
We're talking about a PDA, not a portable Fermi proton-antiproton collider. It's "milli-amp hour," I'm certain.
Forget this marketing propaganda, they use flash ram, thats it, and the rom itself is a flash rom, yes you can write it but not too often. (the flash rom is used for software updates of the core software)
Btw. I have a Z5500 excellent tool once you add a few programs, the best PDA Ive used so far, but not for the average joe blow, the soft has still a few rough edgest left where the console comes handy from time to time.
Basically you are right but you forget one thing, those mainframes you mentioned Unix was designed for had much less ram and less powerful processors than the average PDA, the Z even has more ram and is more powerful than the machine Linus wrote his first Linux version on :-)
Xscale also has a bunch of hardware support for playing mpeg video, but I don't understand the details.
Thats awesome. Now we will have a Zaurus that will run faster and last longer that still is missing some basic functions as already stated. I agree that Sharp needs to make the Zaurus "at least" do what their very first PDA's could do. I don't want to demand too much of them but MY GOD how could one forget to create a notes/memo sycronization app.. Sorry but uploading documents that whipe out category preferences just doesnt cut it.. Don't get me wrong, I love the Zaurus but I have had to give up some real productivity by switching to it.
That absolutely cannot be true unless it's all RAM. If it were all RAM, you'd have to reload the OS every time you turned off the little power switch (including the bootloader, which would have to be done through some exotic means), so this is unlikely.
RAM and Flash are totally different things. For one, RAM is volitile and will lose it's state when power is removed; flash will not. You cannot somehow "redistribute" between them since they're physically separate and radically different chips.
However, if you're installing apps and such to your ram (a common thing to do), you may make a distinction between the ramdisk area (often implemented using Linux's tmpfs, which actually grows and shrinks dynamically up to a hard set limit at mount time) and system RAM, the area that programs run in.