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Zaurus SL-5600/SL-5500 Comparison Whitepaper
Bill Kendrick writes "A cool as the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 Linux-based PDA is, there are definitely some quibbles about battery life, software and syncing. Fortunately, it seems the folks at Sharp and TrollTech have been working on it for the new 5600 model.
Sharp just posted a whitepaper (PDF) comparing the two models. (Newer kernel, no more root-privs-for-everything, JFFS2, dropping slow XML for PIM stuff, and USB-IO syncing, to name a few.)"
Yes they fixed the battery life. Including a battery that's a little over 2 times the size of the old one.
with its 640x480 super crisp display and its morphing ability. I hope they will sell it outside of Japan. Sharp had a lot of them at CeBIT, not a single SL-5600. They know it's much nicer.
Here are some links:
My Zaurus Info page
Conics Shop for ordering outside of Japan
Sharp's Japanese Zaurus Page
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
> Why wouldn't I just run as root?
Why would you ?
Seriously though, if you're logged in as root, you can do an end-run around lots of the mechanisms that make Linux as stable as it is. If you're a nonprivileged user, AND provided the kernel is doing it's job properly, it shouldn't be possible to make the thing crash.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
One thing they've done differently is the memory.
Its flash+RAM based, instead of being ROM+RAM-based.
That should effectively provide more space (if they write all persistent data to flash when the unit is shut down), and better battery utilisation.
This is a cool device, and a couple of my friends have the original 5500. One of them, who does testing for EMC, used to mount his test volumes over NFS, and start off his test scripts over telnet, all over the 802.11, while he sat in boring meetings.
Not as much software out there, compared to the palmOS platform, though.
Just a recomendation on what cf 802.11b card to look at...
I have used both the SMC 802.11b cf card and the Socket Low Power 802.11b cards. The Socket definately draws less power, and my experience is that it has an equal range.
The down side of the Socket is that none of the built in wireless apps, nor any of the wireless apps (other than the text mode wireless tools) know how to communicate with the card, nor do they recognize it as a wireless network card.
The driver for the card is on the http://www.zaurus.com/feed server as spectrum24drivers (link is untested, set up your ipkg installer to get the drivers via your usb connection, or pull them down, get them on a cf or sd card and install from there.)
One of the local Office Depot stores is where I got my Socket card this week, There is a $30 mail in rebate, bringing the price down from 149 to 119 after the rebate.
My experience with the SMC card was I would get about half an hour of live time with the card installed. With the Socket card I am getting much closer to 2 hours, if not 3. Considering that I only get about 4 hours of live time without any network interface, I am fairly impressed.
If you drain the battery with this card, while sitting on the crapper, you really do have more problems than you thought.
-Rusty
You never know...
Fonts are fine for PDA use. They don't run X (unless you add it!), they run embedded-QT. The 5500s included Opera as a browser, although I prefer konqueror-embedded.
In fact, I prefer OpenZaurus in almost all ways. They've had jffs support for some time, and it's a simple process to mount /home on a 256M SD card. With that config, my 32M 5500D has more available RAM than a Sharp ROM configured 64M 5500.
There might be differences between ARM and Xscale. I wish I knew.
In anycase, the white paper looks like it's simply describing the difference between the software out of the box. There's a wealth of "upgrades" out there to use, even whole distros for the ambitious:
Ordinary software packages availiable include useful things like a terminal.
I've seen the Open Zaurus working and it's very neat with working GUI, productivity suit and CF wifi. It is essentially a full replacement for the sotware that comes with the 5500, but you can keep and reinstall that software too.
The Debian project looks less developed but is working on cool stuff like an X interface. They have a kernel and root system set up, and a working X. It would be fun to work on.
Ironically, my Zaurus has a better processor than my much bigger laptop. It would be borg the two together, X to export aps to the laptop and disk storage in return. I expect to be able to do this latter than sooner.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It does exist. It is called KitchenSync. Currently, it is part of the CVS tree for kdepim, and is scheduled to appear in KDE 3.2 You can have a look at the latest available tarball here. It works well enough. Currently it syncs to Agenda V3 or Qtopia/Opie based handhelds, and supports syncing addressbook, todolist and calendar to KAddressbook and KOrganizer. Works as expected, but it is still pretty much alpha quality. With enough time, this program should be able to sync just about anything to your desktop. A big thank you to the KDE and Handhelds.org people working on this.
The 5500 came (comes) packaged with a version of Opera. You can also install an embedded version of Konqueror. See here for more software than you'll know what to do with :-)
According to the whitepaper the 5600 uses Intel's PXA250 XScale chip, which this article seems to imply may well be discontinued already!! Hopefully the new PXA255 is a drop-in replacement. In that case the new 5600s will be even faster since the 255 uses a faster memory bus. If it's not a drop-in expect a delay while Sharp figures out what the heck to do!
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To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.
From what I understand, the SL-5600 uses Opera6 as the default browser.
I have a SL-5500 which comes with Opera 5 as it's default browser.
Downloadable browsers include Konquer and Links-ssl.
-Rusty
You never know...
I dropped Sharp's OS a couple of months ago in favor of OpenZaurus, and found nothing but improvements. (Almost) every complaint I had about the original software was addressed:
1. The calendar app is much more stable. My one remaining issue is with repeating appointments: if you modify a repeating appointment on the Z, it'll duplicate itself and you'll have two appointments in the same spot: one with the old info, and one with the new. If you instead modify the appt. with the Qtopia Desktop software (Linux--I never use the Windows version), you don't have this problem.
2. I used to lose all my to-dos everytime I synced with the Sharp software. Fixed.
3. You can get ipks from the Zaurus Software Index (http://www.killefiz.de/zaurus) to preserve the Jeode environment as well as the Hancom apps and Opera, so you can still use them on OpenZaurus. These utilities will convert them to ipks which you can copy to your machine. When you install OpenZaurus, you can just reinstall these apps as normal. I can testify that the Jeode one works: I don't have a need for the Hancom apps or Opera, so I never reinstalled them.
4. The theme feature is there in OpenZaurus, so if you're using it, you've already got what Sharp gives you in the 5600. I'm using the Liquid theme.
5. There's a nice Today app in OpenZaurus that gives you a snapshot of your day--both to-dos and calendar appointments.
6. I haven't encountered a 3rd party ipk that I used to use in Sharp's rom that doesn't work with the OZ rom.
7. I had to upgrade Sharp's rom to use a 128MB SD card. This also broke my connection to the Linux version (some "security patch" was also included in this upgrade that prevented the Linux Qtopia desktop from connecting, and also disabled ftp). Installing OZ fixed all of these issues.
8. OZ includes OpenSSH by default, so it's much easier to get into the Z and copy files.
9. The Sharp ROM crashed all the time. And I mean ALL THE TIME. I don't have that problem with OZ.
To get to the point, I would recommend to anyone who runs Linux and is purchasing a 5500 right now to save yourself the headaches and replace the default ROM with OpenZaurus. If you back up Jeode, Hancom, and Opera, you won't lose anything by doing it, and you'll have a much more stable PDA.
I wrote a review of three wireless cards with the Zaurus last year: Linksys, SMC, and Socket. The Socket did look to be the most promising in terms of battery life, though the range seemed a bit shorter. Of course, at the time the drivers were in pretty bad shape. The SMC was my choice at the time.
The antenna housing on older Linksys cards is something to watch out for --- it completely blocks the stylus silo. (I had a pic up showing that, but the review site seems to have screwed up the links to the photos.) I've heard that this problem has been fixed on newer Linksys cards.
In any case, check out the battery life comparison in that review --- you'll see that active communications (using VNC) really took the punch out of the SL-5500's batteries.
What I find interesting is that they've dropped the XML format for their PIM applications. Now they're using something called DTM:
... However, all the default PIM applications on the SL-5600 now adopt and are managed by the DTM (PIM database). Thus, and 3rd party PIM applications that access the XML files on the SL-5500 PIM applications will not run as expeected. ...
DTM (DaTa Manager) is a set of modules that provide database functions to the applications.
This does not spell out well for third party developers who now have to have compliant apps for the 5500 and the 5600. It sounds like they're using something like the pdb format for palm. If they're going to change, I wonder why they didn't go with a standard like iCalendar (RFC2445) at least for the PIM apps.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
The Socket low power wifi card works out of the box in the new SL5600 and C700 units :)
I am still waiting for the C700 to use the PXA255 chipset though.
Geez guys, learn how to use your pda already. And yes, theKompany and OpenZaurus kicks palm booty.