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Sharp Zaurus SL-5600 PDA Review

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the hardware-to-lust-after dept.

An anonymous reader sent us a link to a review of the Sharp Zaurus SL-5600 PDA. This Linux based handheld with a built in qwerty keyboard with decent connectivity. As with most PDAs, there are a lot of tradeoffs that have to be made yet. Read the review to see what they are.

2 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Cool by N4m0r · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The 5600 is a great PDA, I really like mine. As far as syncing with Linux though, forget it. The CD comes with software to sync with Outlook, that's it. Apparently the Qtopia-Desktop software for Linux allows you to backup data, no syncing though. I say apparently because I cannot get it to run on my Redhat 9 system. From what people are saying in the Sharp forums, not too many people have had success with it. Also, with the 5600 and the latest ROM update to the 5500 the PIM data format is different so if you were syncing your PIM data in Linux you won't be able to any more. The people who were working on syncing software have had to start over. It appears Sharp is leaving Linux desktop support for the Zaurus up to the community, and they are not being all that cooperative. The Kompany apparently has syncing on their list of features to add to their tkc PIM apps for the Zaurus. Of course they are only worried about making sure it syncs with their product Aethera. Its really too bad, I'm sure if Sharp would just cooperate enough to create some sort of libraries or tools for getting the Zaurus data to and from the desktop people would be writing sync software for every PIM desktop app under the sun.

  2. Re:SL-5600 Synchronization Problem by Minna+Kirai · · Score: 4, Insightful
    1. The storage was never actually XML, just a similar looking arbitrary format. The filename ended in .xml, and XML parsers worked on it, but it wasn't fully compliant. There were no DTDs supplied, for example, and some fields were totally undocumented. However, since the data was all fat ascii, it was trivial to reverse-engineer the important parts.
    2. From a performance perspective, switching away from XML is a big win. You can't really argue it, technically. The pseudo-XML format wasted space and was slow. If they'd just provide documentation on the binary format (and also a prediction as to how long that format will be remaining unchanged), then everything would be fine.

      In fact, since the system is based on Free Software, they should just release the whole source code to their PIM apps and be done with it. A programmer would jump up from the "community" to take care of their Linux synchronization needs- and probably someone else would volunteer to improve the UI on the PIM itself (which needs a lot of work in comparison to the competition from Palm)

      By selling a Linux PDA, but not distributing the code to most of the applications, Sharp is getting the worst of both worlds in terms of user acceptance.


    Some more technical detail:
    Why does pseudo-XML waste space?
    Because more than 50% of the total file is repetitive boilerplate. The addressbook.xml looks like this:
    < Contact FirstName="Bob" MiddleName="Mack" LastName="Dobbs" FileAs="Dobbs, Bob Mack" Company="CoSG" BusinessPhone="866-512-7801" >
    Not only are strings like "FirstName" and "BusinessPhone" repeated for every entry, but each person's name is stored twice! And remember, on a handheld portable, file size is more precious than on desktops or laptops.

    Why is pseudo-XML slow?
    Because XML is a linear file format. If you have 900 entries in the contact list (not at all unrealistic), and you add a new email address to contact #356, then the entire file past that point will have to be re-written. (Unless the programmer was extra-careful and used specialized file-shifting code, which still won't help in all cases). In practice, this meant that Zaurus users with thousands of contacts had to withstand startup or shutdown times of 20+ seconds.