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.)"

Comments

Re:Non-root privileges?

[rusty0101]

There are several servers available for the Z, including but not limited to ftp, apache, and samba. With both ftp and samba, since you are effectively root, there is noting preventing joe random hacker from downloading, editing and uploading your /etc/ files and making the device do lots of things you would otherwise not be planning on.

Who needs a root-kit if the device does everything as root?

-Rusty

Re:Battery comparison

[rusty0101]

speculation would be that the xscale processor supports operational modes that the strongArm processor does not (shutting down parts of the processor that are not in use, idle sleep, etc) and the fact that the two processors run at very different speeds, which affects anything else running on the processor buffers.

-Rusty

Re:OpenZaurus is better

[krow]

Personally I found that Open Zaurus:
1) Crashed more often
2) Email application was more primitive
3) The backup didn't work at all
4) The application to install packages looked nicer but screwed up for more often.

I went back to using the normal ROM's for this reason.

Maybe someday...