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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.)"
Gee, that's a terrific battery comparison chart. They're "comparing" both units under completely different operating conditions. At least they come right out and say it, but this gives absolutely no indication that they've fixed the 5500's weak battery life. Bummer.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
I ordered one of the $170 dollar 5500's off of HSN. I don't care how bad it is compared to the 5600, $170 for a pda with 2 expantion slots that also happens to run linux! I can't wait too boot and get to a shell! :)
Program Memory (Work area)
SL-5500: 28.1MB
SL-5600: 29.1KB
Huh??
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Shouldn't the 5600 software just install on the 5500? I mean, the 5500 has more RAM, and it's trivial to put in lots of flash. Does that mean Sharp is not going to provide an upgrade?
The whitepaper shows that the 5500 can only record at 22khz using the mic input. Is this a device limitation, or software? Because I really want to use this when it becomes available (which will use the CF slot for input and a mic jack on the add-on itself), but it's not going to be worth it if the highest sampling rate available is 22khz :( Does anyone know anything?
Chris
Anybody notice that the entire god damned front page is only stories from Taco? Did his wife kick him out of bed or what?
now it have 4 new themes! Finally something that I can say clearly that is better in the new model!
What issue exists with running as root on a PDA? It seems like a non-issue to me.
I mean it's a PDA: personal digital assistant. It's not like it's a multi-user workstation or an network server. Why wouldn't I just run as root?
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
What ever happened to the KDE sync program that would sync QPE/Opie based Linux handhelds?
One thing I'd like to see is some company selling OS upgrades that lets people throw away Microsoft Pocket PC/Windows CE and replace with Linux. But then there must be a good syncing solution for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Ciryon
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***
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.
Why do you suppose they didn't compare battery life under similar conditions? Most of the specs for the 5600 look great, and the battery life on its own doesn't look bad either, but this paper gives no basis for comparing the battery life of the 5500 and the 5600.
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.
- Although you can configure multiple SMTP accounts, the mail client only uses the one configured first
- Every now and then the soft eject for a CF card doesn't work and you have to physically take it out
In addition, since Sharp has already worked on a new kernel, PIM, etc., it would be great if existing 5500 owners could benefit from what their software group has done since the latest firmware upgrade came out.The hardware changes on the 5600 are not a radical shift from the 5500 (unless, of course, you buy into the MHz hype). I bet that not many people will ditch their 5500s and invest in 5600s primarily to fix problems that could be resolved through a firmware upgrade.
As a (relatively proud) owner of the 5500, I can tell you for sure that there's a lot of room for improvements.
The Raven
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!
-----------------------
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.
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?
So far as I know, the only driver for SD cards is closed-source and only available for 2.4.8; does anyone know if the 5600 supports them, or just the MMC version?
Geez guys, learn how to use your pda already. And yes, theKompany and OpenZaurus kicks palm booty.