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Sharp Ships Zaurus SL-5600; 5500 Available Cheap

Posted by timothy on from the itchy-wallet-finger dept.

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.

6 of 332 comments (clear)

  1. Media Player by IceFox · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
  2. Phone home? by famebait · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Hmmm.
    • Real speaker and mike
    • Room for wireless card
    • Running linux

    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
  3. Almost. So close, if only for the screen! by mcgroarty · · Score: 4, Interesting
    This is very close to being a perfect device. The only complaint I've got is that it's yet another 240x320 screen device. At that size, it's not quite enough to make it easy on the eyes for extended use.

    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?

  4. Re:I dont get it by bstadil · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Just pop in a CF card and use that as the "hard drive"

    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.
  5. Questions for a current Zaurus owner... by PunchMonkey · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...
  6. Re:I dont get it by mivok · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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 :( )