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Sharp Ships Zaurus SL-5600; 5500 Available Cheap
Bill Kendrick writes "LinuxDevices is reporting the good news: Sharp is now shipping the Zaurus SL-5600 Linux-based PDA. Compared to the SL-5500 that's been out for the past year, this new model sports a 400MHz X-Scale CPU, twice the Flash (32MB), twice the RAM (64MB) a much better battery (1700 mAh), and a real speaker and mic. Learn more at Sharp's website." And IceFox writes "Well I wasn't expecting this to happen till next week, but I guess it was put up early. For a limited time on hsn.com you can get a Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 PDA for $198.92, combined with a hsn.com coupon you can bring the price down to $169.08. For anyone who has wanted to play with this Linux PDA here is your chance to get it for very cheap." Update: 03/18 02:03 GMT by T : Reader Brendan Hoar corrects the listed specs: "The specs for the SL-5600 are incorrect. It should be 64MB of flash, 32MB
of SDRAM. It's technically *half* the RAM of the SL-5500, not twice the RAM." Thanks.
32meg will get a lot of folks by, plus you've got to sell lots of overpriced accessories such as RAM upgrades.
I think wireless should be standard in these and dump the IR. Who uses that thing? Oh, except to control your TV.
With this price there is something that I have wanted to do with the Zaurus for a really long time. Turn it into a media player. For $600 or some insane price you can get one of those media players with the 2 line text lcd. Pick up one of these connect it to the network, power, and receiver. Then write a little app to play audio files over the network onto your stereo. You get a COLOR 320x240 lcd TOUCH screen. I don't think that there is any media center that has that for this cheap. With the touch screen there is all sorts of extra goodies that you could put on it to make managing the music easier. Heck you could just run apache on it and browse to it from any computer and all it would do is display the current song and cool swirly plugins. Put some cool visual plugins on it, duck tape it to your stereo rack (or make a nice case, whatever suits you) and enjoy.
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
...as my palm130 (http://www.palm.com/products/palmm130/ )do all that I want, I won't switch; Linux or no Linux.
After all, as far as I can see, the only benefit this device offers is Linux; everything else has been done before either by Palm or bysome PocketPC (allthought I would never get one of those myself, for the same reason).
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
200$ more really would'nt be that *bad*, aslong as they dish'ed them out in the two different types.. one(32meg) for the normal end user that needs an address book, and another(512meg) for more upstream users(developers say) that need the space to shift work around and work on the run with.
moo
Sounds like the open-source VOIPs are finally in for some serious usage.
I guess batterly life (while using wifi) will still be pretty bad compared to a moderm mobile, but for international calls it would still be a godsend; I just spent a fortune calling to Europe from the GDC.
sudo ergo sum
For eBook use, one of the more popular applications for PDAs, you really need something more like the newer Sony Palm devices. This resolution isn't quite enough for crisp fonts (even with subpixel rendering) and it's small enough that most preformatted PDF/Web content still needs to scroll half a screen horizontally to be read at a legible magnification.
Can we please please see a Zaurus with a 360x480 display?
This is not a restriction at all, you can synchronize with evolution and the source is open. So if the need is there, and the want is strong enough your favorite Linux mail client can synch with your Z.
Use CF for stoarage yes, but you need the SD card for running (most) programs. Installing a program to the CF card will in most cases not work. For Swap you can use SD but there is a speed / number of Writes penalty.
Build in memory vs expansion options almost always comes out favoring expansions. The reason is the volatility and the machanics of the memory market. Most producers can not compete on memory procurement. Reason is the much longer cycle time of finished products (from initial production thru product in users hand) vs memory modules. Plus potential form factor issues, In addition there is the risk factor that the PDA producer rather not take. Risk is expensive even though you win once in a while. That being said I love my Zaurus
Help fight continental drift.
Before I whip out my credit card and ask a friend in the U.S. to forward this on to me since hsn doesn't ship to Canada :-(
- How's the battery life? ~4 hours? ~20 hours? How much do you use your s and how often do you have to recharge?
- The OS that comes presinstalled, it's linux based right? Do I get a shell with it? Can I compile and run most linux apps? What's the deal with OpenZaurus?
I did try and get answers from HSN and myzaurus.com (and even openzaurus.com) but these ones weren't answered.
Thanks!
I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
From what I've seen, the 5600 is very similar to the 5500, which has both sd/mmc and cf slots. The first thing I bought with my 5500 was a 256MB cf card and 128MB sd, storing programs on the sd card and mp3s (well oggs) on the compact flash, which I could remove and replace with the ethernet card when needed net access.
:( )
The real crippling factor is that in the 5500, the memory was all SDRAM which meant that you could flash with a different rom (openzaurus maybe) and have the full 64MB of main memory for loaded program use, and the SD card for storage. With the 5600 its 32MB SDRAM and 32MB flash, which sort of kills this idea. And if you ever want to run more than one app on the pda with 32MB, you quickly run out of memory.
The improvement in battery life is the only reason I would want to upgrade to a 5600, but even then you can get battery packs for the 5500, and its a LOT cheaper. (I paid £300 in january and its gone down to approx £200, probably even less now
Where is the bluetooth support? Or WIFI? I need either to connect to internet and read my mail.
Bluetooth is a must, wifi would be neat. With bluetooth I can get internet access through my GSM phone with GPRS. I use this all the time with my ipaq and Ericsson T68i (or Nokia 7650).
I can drool all day long over how cool the applications are, but without easy internet access when I am on the move, the device is useless.
I think the problem here is that Sharp is really slightly behind the curve on all the new PDA developments other than screen tech, and behind in the business model as well.
Wireless will soon be a built-in feature in just about every portable device and none of the Zaurus models are scheduled to include even bluetooth, so you'll have to sacrifice an expansion slot for that which could otherwise be used for an important purpose.
Plus, the 32MB SDRAM is just not progress. It should be at least 64MB of SDRAM by now. 64MB is not asking for much these days, really.
The only significant improvement here is the move to XScale.
But for those who might want to use the Zaurus as a media player, the interface to the screen is still a dumb, slow, CPU-drive frame-buffer. Add to that the XScale's lack of floating point and you have hardware that just won't want to handle DivX type codecs.
However, there are now graphics accelerators being built for PDAs in order to take more of the load off the CPU. Sharp should look into these.
Sharp is targeting these devices purely at niche enterprise users, but I feel the future will mean the blending of PDA with laptop.
When PDAs are running at 500+Mhz there is no reason for them not to support just about every class of application a laptop a few years ago could do, which includes 3D games and full-framerate video playback.
It won't be long before something like an IPOD which is like a dumbed down PDA that just plays media will evolve into a sub-$1000 laptop class machine that is designed for END USERS rather than the enterprise.
Steve Jobs has already stated that he thinks the Laptop is the future of hardware sales, and I think once you can offer something that gives you the basic functionality you want in a laptop within a PDA formfactor (more importantly, a PDA pricerange) then your sales will literally explode. Something like this eliminates your MP3 player, provides a portable video player, AND eliminates the need for a tablet PC/webpad also.
For most people on modest budgets, the idea of shelling out $1200+ for a laptop is just unacceptable, not in the era of $500 desktop machines... So a single device that can be the swiss-army-knife is going to be the killer app.
Eventually the industry will realize this, even if it has to happen by accident or something.