Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Zaurus 5600 Announced

Posted by Hemos on from the coming-at-you dept.

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."

4 of 289 comments (clear)

  1. Re:If Linux is so free... by finkployd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  2. Most interesting thing... by Psiren · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:performance by js7a · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The only important difference is that the 400 MHz CPU is coupled to a 100 MHz memory bus, instead of the previous 206/103 MHz. So all the assumptions about wait states change. Lots of loops with such assumptions get a lot slower when they are run on the 'faster' platform.

    Xscale also has a bunch of hardware support for playing mpeg video, but I don't understand the details.

  4. Re:64 meg flash, 32mb RAM by MonMotha · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.