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Review of the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500
Gothmolly writes "After reading the story and comments on Slashdot,
I went out and bought one from the Home Shopping Network. It's been a very fun and interesting jump into both the modern PDA (I owned the original Palm until this year) embedded Linux worlds. I've written a review about my experiences over the last few days with it. A lot of this information I found online, a lot is personal experience. HSN is now out of them, but they must still be available cheaply somewhere."
Zaurus 5500 reviews are so 2002. Why, this highly reputable site posted their first review nearly a year ago! I think I'll start reading it instead of Slashdot.
;-)
So long, suckers!
I was gonna shell out for one of these for a little recreational..um...let's call it wireless network vulnerability testing...
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
I missed the offer on HSN by a few hours, so I turned to Ebay. I managed to get one for a pretty good price ($220), but not as cheap as that HSN price.
I'm impatiently waiting for mine to arrive on Monday, according to UPS...
After reading the story and comments on Slashdot, I went out and bought one from the Home Shopping Network...
Michael, I think you've been trolled. No, make that I hope you've been trolled.
Whatever you do, don't buy from HSN. They have no return policy, nor do they have a warranty.
I learned this the hard way when I got my sexy new Palm V three years ago, don't repeat my mistake.
Check it out at www.openzaurus.org! The GUI is much more slick than Sharp's.
This looks like the kinda site to get /.ed soon. Full article text. he didn't have any pics.
Review of the Sharp Zaurus 5500
Ed Schernau, ed at schernau.com
No, there are no screenshots. I don't have a digital camera. It's all 1 giant page. I don't know if this works with OSX, and I don't care at the moment. It supposedly works with Linux, but I haven't tried it. This review is NOT exhaustive. All copyrights are owned by their owners, blah blah blah, I'm not trying to piss people off.
As seen here on Slashdot, the Sharp Zaurus 5500 recently went on sale at HSN due to the newer, Zaurus 5600 being released. Being a cheap geek, I purchased the 5500 model. First, I'd like to say that I was impressed with HSN - very good pricing, and a 15% off coupon for first time orders. Their website is easy to navigate and quick, and provided accurate package tracking. I paid 178USD for it, delivered.
Here's what you get in the package:
The Zaurus 5500
battery (950 mAh)
Getting started manual
User manual
CD of software and drivers
AC adapter
USB Sync cradle/charger - the cradle has a DC jack that you plug the AC adapter into - it does NOT use the USB port for charging power.
Impressions
The Zaurus looks very slick, a polished metal looking PDA. There's a translucent plastic flip-up lid over the touchscreen. The whole thing is about 1.5x the length of a deck of playing cards, and about as wide and thick. The stylus slides into a slot, there is an IR and SD port on 1 side of the unit, and a headphone jack and CF slot on the top of the unit. The bottom of the unit has the DC power jack and 'Sharp IO port', which is where it mates with its cradle.
Hardware/OS
The Z 5500 runs on the Intel StrongArm processor, running a version of Lineo - embedded Linux. It has a 2.4.6 kernel. Because of this, any Linux software compiled for ARM (like the whole Debian arm tree) will run. You get 64MB of memory, 1/2 of which is locked away by the Z, so you have 32MB to run in. This has not proved to be a problem, yet. It runs Qtopia, an embedded GUI system on a 320x240 color screen. Almost any linux-y thing you can think of, you can do. It has a shell, you can even make swapfiles to increase running memory (at the expense of storage of course). There are init scripts. Repeat after me: It's a miniaturized Linux box. Everything runs as root. It uses ext2fs for main storage, and minix and cramfs for its own purposes. You can type 'mount' to see what's what.
Keyboard
The keyboard is excellent. You hold the Zaurus in both hands and type with your thumbs. Clever use of 'Shift' and 'Function' keys give you nearly QWERTY layout. You can get about 1 letter every 3/4 of a second.
Handwriting
It also does handwriting recognition, in a certain area of the screen. You enable this by hitting a small icon on the screen, and scribble away. I've not spent much time with it, yet. It's fiddly, but not as bad as Palm's Grafiti.
Backlight
Good, but not great. The screen is lit from a flourescent light on the side, which can look weird if you hold the Z at an angle. Some parts of the screen are brighter than others.
Sync
The Z connects to its host via IP over USB. Syncing occurs completely over IP. This is slick, if you get a CF Ethernet card for it, you can (in theory) sync with your system anywhere in the world. My old Palm had a serial cable, so USB seemed like warp speed to me. Save yourself headache - set the Zaurus to NOT use DHCP, likewise your PC system. It defaults to 192.168.129.201, your PC defaults to 192.168.129.1. There's a GUI to configure all of this on the Z.
GUI
Very cool. Touch once to run an app, touch and hold to bring up properties. A combination of thumb and thumbnail will get everything done.
I hooked it up and let it charge for a while, then loaded the software onto my PC. I have Windows2000 running on an ABit BP6 motherboard, with 2 USB 1.0 ports. This m
Does everything really run as root? What's up with that?
My blog
I jumped on the HSN deal as well and incredibly short review: I like it. I'm not much of a PDA person (had a palm, played with it for a week, just sold it on eBay) but its worth its weight in gold for its wireless ability (with appropriate CF wireless adapter). My GF *always* grabs my iBook when she's at my place, now I can go back to surfing on the couch. Its also easier to carry to the local coffee shop (that has free access) so I can grab a cuppa tea and flame idiots on Plastic.
For me, for $160 (+$80 for the wireless card) it's been $$$ well spent.
I don't know much about these devices (yet), but I do remember reading about the changes from the 5500 to the 5600, and one of them is that it's no longer necessary to run everything as root. The 5600 looks pretty sweet...
Cheers,
Jeremy
I also grabbed a Zaurus 5500 from the HSN special. Guess those paid-u-tainment slash-vertisements work.
First thing I did was to look for the terminal package. One version came on the CDs, so I installed that.
Second thing I did was to find the OpenZaurus installer (now 3.1-rc3.1), but after finding with several problematic .ipk's from the Zaurus Software Index, I went back to the stock Sharp ROM image. Can you imagine holding the C and D chicklet keys on one side, and poking a recessed reset button on the other? All with the DC power plug attached? I had to do this operation a few times in my experiments, and I can safely say they chose a combination quite apt at avoiding the accidental re-flash.
I still haven't gotten the USB networking worked out. It apparently needs the usbdnet module, which is not in the Red Hat stock kernels (latest errata nor the last beta). I prefer to stick to my distro's official kernels, rather than rebuilding a kernel just so I can ssh to a pda. Maybe eventually.
I noticed that if I install a new ipk file, it restarts Qtopia, which loses the icons for any other already-running tasks. (ps aux) still shows the tasks, they just have no gui anymore.
I noticed that if I click an app button to switch away from the terminal, some key cruft like ~3 or ~4 appears in the terminal. Also, if the unit gets suspended (low power, power off button, etc.), then whatever console app was running gets sent to the background and I have to (fg 1) when I return. This screws up some console programs which don't have a convenient "redraw all" key for when you return. (Example app: frotz.)
I noticed that the text editor opens to what looks like an empty note which is ready for typing, but no, it's in a no-document state and you must tap for a "New" text document before starting.
I figured out how to retrain the handwriting, but not sure how often I'll use it. The real keyboard, virtual keyboard and pickboard are quite enough for text entry, thanks. Weird that you can tap the Fn key prefix then tap the desired key for a function, but you have to HOLD a shift key while tapping a letter. Supporting tap-shift-tap-letter would probably been nicer given the form factor.
I would never have purchased this kind of device anywhere near its original price-- it's a toy to me, not a tool. But it's worth the money I put into it.
[
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5902 and follow up on http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6184
But does it run linux?
In my own opinion, CF memory has two handy features that make it a reasonable purchase.
First of all, my Z runs with a wifi card in the CF slot most of the time. However I have several situations where that is of little or no use. My low-power cf card does not support Kismet, so I can not use it to scan for open nets. For the most part I do not need the additional battery drain either.
When I do not need the wifi card, I have found that having a couple of hours of music on a 128M cf memory card can help while away longer bus rides, without affecting how much application space is available on my SD card.
Also I have several CF interfaces for my computers, being able to read/write the CF to transfer stuff when I don't want to use a wifi card is also handy.
As noted in the article sd/mmc cards cost more and tend to have lower capacity than CF cards.
As a last note, there are bluetooth interfaces built to run in sd/mmc slots, which may be of interest to people using blutooth enabled network, phone, printer, or even headset devices. In that case the memory expansion opportunity would be the CF slot.
Then again, that's just my opnion. You will have to make up your own mind.
-Rusty
You never know...
If you have a Zaurus, at some point you really should check out OpenZaurus, which is a complete replacement ROM. If you have a CompactFlash card, then making the switch is very easy and if you don't like it, it's also trivial to switch back to Sharp's ROM. So my suggestion is to try it out early before you get too comfortable and spend a lot of time setting up the PDA just the way you like it.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Some more useful links:
Zaurus DevNet forums
The Zaurus Notebook (tips and tricks)
Zaurus Loves Linux
Now what I really want, is a portable device to connect the usb cable from the phone described in this article to the Zaurus dataport.
Sometime while I'm in Japan for the next year I'm going to buy an SL-C700.
All the features of the SL-5600 with a nice big screen and full keyboard.
I know Dynamism wants $700 for theirs, but if you can get it for less, there are guides online that have reverse engineered their localization process. I don't know what their markup is but I've seen it put at around $200 (!!)
My GF *always* grabs my iBook when she's at my place...
Man, sucks to be you. My GF always grabs a certain something of mine that's way more fun when she's at my place!
I just bought mine at the same time, for the same reason, and I'm in the process of writing a review I was going to post to /., damn you! oh well, guess I can find better things to do...
i m wating for the sharp that i saw in the linuxworld expo in NY. It was kinda slick, but too bad it is only available in Japan right now.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Does anyone know of a good source for these devices in the UK? They seem very expensive over here! (dabs.com @ £233 / $368 US).
I was in the market for a laptop so I could read email, surf, and SSH from anywhere (including when on the shitter). Wanted WiFi as well.
.. about 1/10 of the time it will lock up and you have to hard reset (clears the memory!). Do the following:
.. that would rock.
.. give 'em a couple more years to improve (software, processor speed, battery life) and they will positively ROCK. Hopefully now that more folks are using them there will be more software. I'm personally looking out for an RSS newsreader and a simple outliner (like OmniOutliner on the mac). Also an SFTP graphical client would be cool.
But then the HSN special came up, and DAMN I had to try it out.
It's a very cool device which is perfect for my needs but a little lacking as a general purpose PDA. However it has a LOT of potential.
Hint: don't bother with OpenZaurus unless you like to experiment. It breaks everything. Stick with the stock ROM if you want to use PIM functions. I had problems with Opera, Konqurer, TheKompany's apps, and pretty much anything that didn't come with OZ. Too bad, because the base components of OZ are much better than the stock ROM (for instance it actually shows how much battery you have left as %-age).
I set up wireless, set it up to do backups with rsync+SSH, and to NFS mount my MP3 directory. I have it running through my privoxy proxy, filtering out ads and cookies... Sweeeeeeeeet!
Hint: to set up your WCF12 card (if you have one of those), set up syslog to log somewhere, run syslog, and plug in your card. You'll see the necessary parameters to set up the card in the logs.
Another hint: DON'T EVER REBOOT FROM THE GUI
1) quit Qtopia
2) while it's counting down, hit '/'
3) hit 'a' at the menu to get a console login
4) log in
5) type "telinit 6"
Be sure to back up often anyway, since your stuff is stored in a ramdisk.
Anyway this is LOTS of fun for linux geeks, I haven't had this much fun since I installed OS X (UNIX COMMAND LINE.. ON A MAC??? AND NOW ON A PDA??? *spurt*). In fact I often think to myself.. whoa...what if APPLE made one of these bad boys with Mac OS X and apps that "just work"
Unfortunately it doesn't work with OS X / iSync but you can at least set up USB networking with this driver. Tell Apple you'd like them to support the zaurus, since many Zaurus geeks are probably also OS X geeks!
Anyway, these things are super-fun
I've had my Zaurus 5500 for about a year now, but only recently switched to the OpenZaurus firmware. It's faster and more polished than the firmware that comes with the Zaurus, with the advantage of being constantly updated and running better Free Software equivalents like Konqueror Embedded. It's just a matter of copying the ROM images to CF and rebooting the Zaurus to flash the ROM; I'd recommend it to any Zaurus owner, including the author of the article.
Anyone know where to find one cheap now? also, how much will the 5600 be?
What is he talking about? I bought my first Palm, 6 or 7 years ago, because of Graffiti and I'm yet to see such a reliable text recognition system on any other device. Admittedly it does take 30 minutes or so to learn and a reviewer too lazy to include a picture of the device being reviewed might not have the attention span for that.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I love my new $180 HSN zaurus! I love all of the remote admin tasks that I can use the zaurus for. Right now I'm addicted to playing doom (prboom) on it with full midi sound trak! I also get a kick out of runnig the doom server for other players to game on. :)
FYA, your modern PDA is outdated ... out-dated.
If I were to get another PDA, I've had and sold 3, I would get a Zaurus without a second thought. I think it's the best looking PDA on the market, plus it runs my favorite OS ;) .
Alas, for the time being I must be confined to writing an imitation Linux shell for my Ti-89... =\ O well.. hopefully I'm getting paid soon... =)
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
This is a karma whore. The site isn't showing any signs of being slashdotted. Why? Because it is a static page with no pictures or scripts. It is well known that the slashdot effect usually only affects pages with large amounts of pictures or an active script/database.
In short, mod down this karma whore.
I also bought the SL-5500 on HSN. I am also very happy.
My one complaint is that I can't hookup the SL-5500 to my cell phone, a Samsung SPH-N400. My cell phone has no way to connect to a regular serial port, but it does have a USB cable to connect to a USB host. The host computer can than use the cell phone as a modem to connect to the Internet using Sprint PCS's Vision network. The only way I have thought of to connect the phone to the PDA would be to use this CF USB Host adaptor to give the Zaurus a USB host port. I can't find anything that suggests whether the Zaurus supports this device or not. Anyone have any idea if the Zaurus supports the Ratoc USB Host CF adaptor? I think that adaptor sells for $150, so I'm not keen on buying it until I have a reason to believe it will work.
Send/track messages to 100K people: www.xPressAlert.com
Read the post. Need I say more? Thanks.
I lucked out, and ordered mine a few hours earlier than the article came out on slashdot. (www.slickdeals.net - probably giving a good secret away.) I actually had 2 hours to research it before deciding to buy it.
Mostly I bought this since besides my old Palm III that I use for a remote control at home, I am PDA-less. The crowd at our M$ shop at work are all getting PocketPC's. So far I've been able to prove it's worthiness except to those with the brand-spanking-new ones. But for the price, I have them all whipped.
I immediately bought a 256MB SD card, since even if this turned out useless, I could find another use for the memory card. There was a spare CF wireless card at work (D-Link DCF-650W). It DHCP'ed instantly. My only complaint is that when it's in you have no access to insert or remove the stylus. I tried someone else's thinner 660W, which gives access to the stylus, and that worked equally as well.
I spent the first day with it getting Kismet to work, making the guy with netstumbler on his laptop jealous.
Next, I had to try the Quake port. Yes, it's neat, since it's Quake on a PDA, but don't bother doing anything with it other than saying "Look! It's Quake! On a PDA!"
I must say, the most novel thing is being able to telnet and VNC to it. I find Zsafe extremely useful. I've yet in my position to need access to e-mail on a PDA, since at home I already have access. Wardriving with it is great. This has proven to be an extremely worthwhile toy.
I mean, read the review:
-Portable web server
-Wireless networking capable
-SSH
-Able to connect by USB or LAN
This will be a tool at the disposal of every al Qaeda foot soldier and Iraqi intelligence officer.
Sharp must be stopped and sanctioned for this negligence.
My God... think of the children, man!
Good thing I have Homeland Security on speed dial.
Life is tough. It's tougher if you're stupid. --John Wayne
I've put off getting a PDA for ages, usually what I like costs way more than I want to pay. Now I'm going to get all these little pieces of paper together and enter phone nums, email addrs, snailmail addrs, etc. into this baby. It's pretty cool, though the battery certainly has too short a life to play games on it. I've looked around and batteries are ~50$US. I figure I'll get one next month. Big project will be finding a way to connect it to my Garmin ETrex :-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What's wrong with Sharp Zaurus - mainly battery life, applications crashing when dealing with lartge documents, inconvenient thumb keyboard.
What's good and bad about Dell Axim - mainly problems with battery reporting, problems with ActiveSync and infamous battery reporting bug.
I wonder how many Zaurii HSN sold that day, everyone and their uncle seems to have acquired one.
/etc/pcmcia/wlan-ng.conf
Here's a little word to the wise if you're looking for 802.11b access. Do NOT buy a Linksys WCF12 card if you're planning on using the Sharp ROM. It doesn't work out of the box and requires a LOT of trial and error to get functioning. Save yourself a headache and get one that's listed in
I wish I'd done that, would've saved me a couple hours of vi on that little tiny keyboard.
A few reviewers have said they like the word game. It does not have the same letter values or frequency distribution as the "proprietary" cross word game, there are no blanks, you can't pass, it doesn't use OSPD3 and I don't see how to substitute your own word list. The other really annoying feature is the fact that relatively few different starting racks come up. The lack of randomness is pretty lame. ...and it is relatively easy to beat. You can add words by telling it to accept them as they come up, but it would take a while for it to learn that way. If you tell it to ignore the word, then it doesn't "know" that word giving you an advantage. I couldn't figure out who wrote this and if there is a more complete version available.... or better yet the source. Of course there is a good text version of Scrabble written for Linux, but the GUI is nice.
As for the Zaurus itself, its great, but why are the screen colors so washed out? It has almost no yellow. Is this just my particular unit or are they all like that?
OK, I need to get a life......
... and just imagine a beowolf cluster of these things!
Also, today I realized that while using this on the work wireless network (no URL monitoring)... I can use my Zaurus to browse Monster.com without it being displayed on my monitor as people walked by.
Instead I must have looked like I was worried about imminent tasks and appointments!
And now to the porno sites....
Call 'em up on the phone -- (800) 284 3100. Give them the item number (694341) and you can order. They've got thousands, but for some reason it's not on the web site right now. Unfortunately, the 15% off coupon is web-only, but you can use 594321 to get $15 off.
The zaurus is NOT listed on the HSN site, however, if you call them at their 800 number, they can order for you (i just did!:)
1-800-284-3900
The product number is 694341, or they can look it up by keyword
dont forget to get your 15% off if you're a new customer-coupons at: deal news
I'm not buying one of these (or any pda for that matter) until it is smart enough to tell me that the stylus is more than three feet from it and is danger of being lost.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
One cool thing I liked about the Zaurus was that the 'graffiti' mode also provided word completion, something which Palm's overlooked.
That's the first I've heard of OpenPDA. Anyone know if their claim is true that the Sharp Zaurus uses their software?
Send/track messages to 100K people: www.xPressAlert.com
Can somebody please elaborate on this. I would like to do the same but have read docs that say that "Internet Connection Sharing" doesn't work right, and I'd rather just not use it.
Are there step by step instructions for what to edit in the registry and how to add the routes to W2K?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
"There is an app for th Z that gives you a login screen, I have not tested it, so I do not know if it provides user-id with different privledges than root."
OpenZaurus supports this out of the box.
I wouldn't like to be without my Zaurus today. I decided to ditch the Sharp ROM and install openzaurus. It make a cool little PDA and added to a WiFi card open some intresting possibilities. Apart from the normal war walking/driving (if so look at kismet) I've used it to map out the range of my WiFI access point.
The reasoning behind this is that I want to setup a WLAN across the village I live in so that we then might be able to get some broandband. Now instead of having to lug a laptop round and hold it I can just walk out side with the Zaurus and get it to ping. Now I've got a rough idea of how far my access point will go and how to setup a Mesh
Oh and also it has Konquerer which is nice. My only problem is with the konsole app as I won't render pine nicely. Apart from that go buy one
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I might be willing to give up my Treo.
--- Evil robots don't kill people, Mad scientists kill people.
Finally HSN gets some reconition!!!!!!!!! HSN is the shopping channel for Geeks!!!!!
this is little off the topic, but I will be really grateful if someone give me a tip where I could find zaurus 5500 in Toronto. cheaper=better :)
But mine crashes all the time... I lose data left and right.
:(
I was backing up a bunch. realized I had too many files, deleted them, was going to back up, and did a terminal based restart. BAM.. required a reset.. all data gone, no backups.
crap.. and I was having fun...
I just got Zaurus from HSN couple days ago.
/mnt/card and it works great. opie-mediaplayer2 is based on Xine and plays DIVX files nicely. OZ has SSH installed by default, nicer UI, separate power/backlight settings for AC and battery mode, hostap driver for WIFI. The only problem is it is stuck on 2.4.6 kernel because of binary only SD-MMC driver.
Played for one day with factory ROM, experienced lots of freezes with WIFI cards.
Then I flashed OpenZaurus 3.1rc3.1, and now 3.2.
All the hangs are gone, most programs are much better, internal flash is writable. I added 256MB SD-MMC card and moved part of the system to
- Need to patch kernel with a **usbdnet** patch; follow guide.
- this makes iptables masq/NAT'ing the Zaurus out to the internet a whole lot easier than Windows. Once masqueraded though you can then upload/download from and to the Z from any machine that can ping it - Windows, Mac or linux. It's just another machine on the network, albeit on a different subnet probably.
- in Windows Qtopia Desktop sync'ing app you can then try pinging the Zaurus's IP. If you can we can, then try filling that IP in under USB connection - even though it isn't connected via USB. It'll connect anyway?!
- however usbdnet patches are only available for a limited number of kernels, none at present are 2.5 series. Hopefully usbdnet will soon be appropriate to see in the kernel or be modulised (/me prays)
Disclaimer: I typed this after a long nightshift
A blog I run for the wealth
yeah that's right, dude.
On reboot, it went through a traditional fsck routine, and rose like Lazarus.
Okay, I have a palm m105, but I'm making sure this (or something like it, with wireless networking) will be something I'll buy sometime soon.
:)
At any rate, I consider a PDA to be an essential part of my life. I'm an inherently disorganized person, and I needed an organizer (but didn't have one of any kind) long before I bought my palm last October. For years I've been trying to make my computer run reminder programs to tell me when important events were happening, but have always lamented that I didn't have it around all the time. Since I take my palm with me everywhere, I no longer have that problem. Keeping addresses, notes, and to-do's I've always done with paper, but this replaces all those with one tiny package, and it's far easier to sort, coallate, reorganize, and search.
Combined with a my full-sized keyboard, I could have easily used this thing for taking notes in College, and I wish I had (even though it would have been more expensive back then). Currently, I use it for putting in the copious notes I need at work for things that would normally require a scrap of paper. And the to-do list quite handily rids me of the mess of post-it notes that I used to have on my desk. The reason I could really use one that uses wireless networking is so I could paste my notes (often entries from our database) into it so that they can be sneakernetted somewhere else.
One of the other great things that I like to do with this thing is get books in text format so that I can read them while I commute. It's worth the price of a PDA for that reason alone since the palm is way lighter than anything bigger than a paperback. This makes it a great tool for reading books that tend to be quite large, like technical manuals (or The Lord of the Rings, which I'm currently reading - it's 1.2 megabytes if you're curious) for instance. And since my public library has books online that you can only read in a web browser, that wireless functionality suddenly becomes a great boon indeed.
And of course, it's also a great toy for when your travelling or otherwise bored.
Maybe this helps you get more out of your PDA... that's my intention anyway.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I bought my Zaurus in August, and Sharp and Trolltech were both saying something along the lines of "OS X Sync Real Soon Now". Well, it's 9 months later and there's still nothing. The Trolltech site says that there's a version of Qtopia Desktop for OS X, but there's no place to actually download it. I like my Zaurus, mostly, but not being able to sync it with my Mac is really annoying.
The SL-5600 (the successor) supposedly is truly multi-user, and therefore much safer. I don't know how PDA users will react to having to put in a password to install software though...
A failed OpenZaurus flash cannot break your Zaurus. It's impossible. So there's no need to be "brave" -- it will work. Or if it doesn't, well, you're safe. The downside is the need for a CF card to flash, and a common problem is that copying the file to the CF card on your Zaurus results in a corrupt file (since the usbdnet driver sucks so much) -- make sure to md5sum it before flashing.
A problem mentioned in the review is the horribleness of the usbdnet drivers. These work in OpenZaurus.
Not to mention, we've got a cooler website. Oh, there are other advantages too. And the feed has zillions of cool software packages.
Isn't this the form factor most would prefer over the SL-5500/5600's tiny "thumb" keyboard? ;-) -, there's probably nothing wrong with setting up an actual external "petition page" as well...)
Sharp's reasoning not to release it outside Japan might be that x86 sub-notebooks never sold well elsewhere, and Psion does not have any new keyboard-based devices in the pipeline either.
However, Sharp's management just may not have taken into account how much the "geek population" has grown over recent years, and that the concept of a diskless and Linux-based system of this kind has never even been tried in these markets, so even if only a few percent of IT customers may be interested in the C700, extrapolating just from the opinions shown by the Slashdot user base in at least a Zaurus thread per week recently, the release of a C700 (preferably enhanced with more RAM, the improved XScale 255, and WLAN/Bluetooth wireless connectivity) in North America and Europe could well mean several 100000 units being sold within just a few months.
The question is who to turn to inside Sharp to let them know about the demand (I hesitate to call it "petition" for it actually rather means proposing a compelling business case they may not have become aware of themselves just yet).
Apparently the experience how tens of thousands of visitors would stand and stare at their C700s at both Comdex and CeBIT has not been sufficient yet to trigger a rethink of their release policy.
Does anybody know an appropriate eMail address, or survey page we could use to try and convince them to sell the C700 over here as well?
(If someone happens to have a server on broadband -and does not go by the name of Ralsky
> jump into both the modern PDA (I owned the original Palm until this year)
I'd consider any Palm PDA as modern -- I use a Hewlett-Packard 200LX Palmtop, vintage 1991. The price was right (it was given to me when I worked at HP) and amazingly, it can run MS-DOS programs.
Listening to whining about modern PDA synching problems makes me laugh -- the HP200LX syncs through a proprietary serial cable using a DOS program that pre-dates Windows-95.
But this is another instance of the old saw: "good enough is the enemy of perfect". And another example of a market that HP practically invented and now, for one reason or another, no longer competes in.
I have had my Zaurus for a while now.. the desktop has some sort of memory leak so I have to reboot regularly.I use it as an MP3 player and when I replace the .25G CF module, it takes a ouple of minutes to recognize the file system and and make the mp3s available for listening.
.25G CF module). I write notes on it in meetings to the Secure Digital module. I carry my ssh keyring on it. I have tried watching video on it, but the cpu is still too slow. (probably true on the 5600 as well..)
All ths said I carry it everywhere. I have 5 hours of mp3 play time per battery. (This happily corresponds to the 5 hours of mp3s on a
The best thing about it is that I have dropped it on the floor from 4 feet and it is still running unlike my disk drive based mp3 player.
I bought one of these from HSN when I saw the post on slashdot. I am a total sucker for deal posts. I also have an Audrey and two iPaq IA-1s for the same reason.
/etc/hotplug/net.agent script.
/etc/hotplug/net.agent /etc/dhcpd.conf
I spent alot of time looking at the existing website while waiting for my Zaurus to arrive. The best one by far, if you are using Linux on the desktop, is docs.zaurus.com.
I had been having trouble getting the USB networking to work. I ended up configuring a DHCP server on USB0 and modifying the
It discovers your default route (I have a laptop that I use WiFi or ethernet on depending on where I am). It also starts and kills a dhcp server. Its killing the server because the stop command wasn't working when unregistering the interface.
This is a total hack, but it works well.
(--- Email/Message me if you want them, lameness filter wouldn't let them through... too few characters per line ---)
I installed openssh from sourceforge and a lot of apps from the feed at docs.zaurus.com. I bought a Netgear MA701 802.11b CF card. They are on sales (reads rebate) at techdepot.com until the 31st. I also picked up a 128 Mb SD card from amazon (also on sale).
So far its been a lot of fun. Its required more hacking to get it to work with a Linux box then your average user would like but thats the fun part.
Cheers,
Chase
-==-
I have been wondering about getting the zaurus but also the attachment camera, any reviews of how good it is?
Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 items
I bought this on HSN and love it, I picked up an open box CF WiFi card at Best Buy for $33.
Only thing I broke the stylus within two days, but I took a gamble and didn't order another from Sharp and instead bought a palm tungsten|t stylus pack, and it fits perfectly AND the top clicks out for easy removal!
a Review of the Kaypro II and the new 286 portables!
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
If you check on the Net, there's only 2 lines you need to add to the wlan-ng.conf file to get the WCF12 card to work. This card is *extremely* popular with the Zaurus (heck, yes, even I bought one for my Zaurus) and really, Sharp should release a ROM update that includes support for it.
If people took your advice, they'd get the inferior WFC11, which blocks the stylus hole I believe. The WCF12 is nice, although like any add-on, it will reduce your battery life (not as much as the backlight though).
I find it easier to use the IrDA interface to quickly connect the Zaurus to Linux. I have written up the steps here:
http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/~purschke/zaurus/
M.
The Ambicom card you probably got from Best Buy like me did *not* work with the Sharp ROM OOtB, and as soon as I can get my hands on a 64MB CF card I'm flashing to OZ3.2.
:)
Incidentally, I really don't feel the included PIM apps are bad, especially the Hancom apps which you can transfer from your own Sharp image to the OZ one after installation.
If you want an organizer and nothing else, go Palm. If you want an incredibly flexible, capable handheld computer with a builtin keyboard and tons of software, go OpenZaurus.
+++ATH0
http://www.digiuk.com/sharp/
good quick cheap
This is pretty weak review considering the
...
h tm l
long time SL-5500 is on the market. Weakest points:
0. what about Linux syncing ?? Windows 2000
is not a real geek
1. No information about OPIE, Openzurus etc
2. No mention you can play divx;) on it
$30 256MB CF holds 2-4 hours of divx!
3. Nothing about feeds (does author know
what it is ?
4. No mention about 802.11b - with CF cards
as low as $40 and kismet and many 802.11b
apps ported - this is an ultr-cool toy
5. Nothing about week batteries (same for all
Intel based color PDAs)
6. zmeeting ???
There is much more info/links on my site
and I also got the toy a week ago:
www.fuw.edu.pl/~pliszka/hints/notebooks/SL5500.
I've had much better luck with the Zaurus than a PocketPC.
/home/root/Documents/Applications?), but once I got the terminal installed life was great.
My Symbol 802.11 wireless card works great. The screen is too small for many web sites, but for quickly grabbing the news, weather, or tv guide it's great.
I did have trouble sync-ing to WindowsXP. For some reason, sync-ing to WindowsME worked ok. (Probably the only thing ever to work in WinME).
Once I downloaded the wireless driver, no need to sync to anything - just download applications directly. It took me a few minutes to figure out which directory I needed to download packages to (something like
The keyboard is small, but adequate. I wouldn't want to type 20 pages on it, but for a quick email it's fine.
The mail program is ok. It can handle multiple accounts, POP, IMAP, etc. It cannot directly handle any type of secure logins, though, and deleting messages is a PITA because you can only do them one at a time.
All in all...a cool toy. No crashes yet!
Perhaps, but I can input graffiti faster than I can write - the one-stroke, simplified characters just take less time to make and there's no pause while waiting for writing to be converted into text. And I'd guess that training the handwriting recognition system on the Zaurus to use graffiti would be an extraordinarily time-consuming task. I'd like to see a unit with a small but useable keyboard, instead. Something that can run on some sort of standard battery (say, NIMH AAs) rather than proprietary lithium #63416 would also be nice. Why aren't there any standard lithium battery forms (like there are C, D, 9V, etc.), anyway? Oh, right - then companies couldn't sell them for $200, or refuse to let customers replace their batteries and demand they buy a shiny new unit instead.
Something on slashdot what someone out there will probably actually create a Beowulf cluster of.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
A neat little device, just bought for a friends birthday present, starting setting it up and dang, in the boonies we live in, no wireless connection available, so back it goes or to ebay, got from HSN if anyone interested, and a bummer, I might have kept it myself.
PrancingHorse also builds pcs from donations, for handicapped children.
Hello,
Briefly, how well does the Zaurus compare to current PalmOS- Based handhelds?
Heres the dilemma I currently have;
I have had a Palm m105 for over a year and a half, and it has been replaced at least 2 times. It's also on it's way out (ie 'dieing') again, and I'm starting to consider alternatives. I want a relatively desktop-independant system, eg not having to HotSync morning & night every day, and one that is both capable of word processing, at the same time, able to be used as a PIM.
Buying a new Palm means I can keep my apps & settings, but is still more of an organiser (fine if that's all you need, though). The Zaurus looks quite nice, although there are a few apparent problems.
First, I'm a happy Dvorak'ist. Qwerty thumpad != good.
Second, apps. I'd be taking an educated guess in saying there are far more apps with Palm than the Zaurus (not it's own fault, though). My 'bare essentials' would be- Address book, a calendar, a basic database, a birthday tracker of some sort, an encrypted password holder, ToDo, a word processor, and a txt viewer (reading docs on the run).
If none of the above, I could always just buy a notebook and install Emacs & bbdb (although then theres the price, luggability, etc [...]). I'd be interested to see what the opinions are with the Zaurus as a 'small linux laptop'...
If the future navigation system [for interactive networked services on
the NII] looks like something from Microsoft, it will never work.
-- Chairman of Walt Disney Television & Telecommunications
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