New Zaurus Linux PDA Available In the U.S.

pdawerks writes "The Sharp Zaurus SL-6000L handheld, which runs Linux in the Trolltech's Qtopia environment, has finally made it to the U.S. at a pricepoint of $699, according to a PDALive.com article. It has a 4-inch 480 x 640 CG Silicon reflective screen that is much larger than the one in the 5x00 models, and the screen supports rotation on the fly (portrait and landscape modes). Sharp has also incorporated a sliding thumb keyboard into this model."

Comments

SWEET!

[ErichTheWebGuy]

It's a tad on the pricey side, but I'm gonna buy one just to show up some dude at my company who got a tablet with XP Tablet Edition and thinks it's the cat's meow...
Although he sometimes salivates over my Mandrake desktop....

I wonder if it would be any cheaper if they went with GTK instead of Qtopia? Ah, wtf, it should be cool anyway! Count me in!

Re:SWEET!

[boisepunk]

It seems lots of companies are jumping on the Linxu PDA wagon these days (Powerplay V, Softfield VR3, Zaurus, etc). This is great for those of use that use Linux, but the the main problem I see with all of these devices is that they only Sync with Windows out of the box.

Empower Tech, Softfield, Sharp, and now Royal should all be providing software to Sync with Linux (as well as Windows for the Other 95% of the population).

Why is this this so important? Well what has annoyed me the most about linux PDAs is that all the dev tools are in Linux, then you have to transfer your apps over to a Windows Partition to use there Windows transfer software load it (or use Wine).

No Linux PDA will be successful until it Syncs (and Syncs well) with Linux. Heck, some Palm PDAs are easily to sync to with Linux then the current Linux PDA offerings.

The market already has successful PDA platforms that Sync with Windows (Palm, Pocket PC, Psion). Why not finally make one that Syncs with Linux out of the box?

Somehow I doubt Royal will step up to the plate in this regard.

Re:SWEET!

[phrasebook]

I'm gonna buy one just to show up some dude at my company

That's the spirit!

Reminds me of this guy, where he writes: "I bought a PowerBook G4 in late 2002, mainly because I liked the packaging and I wasn't willing to give any money to Microsoft". What astounding logic. And then in the very next sentence he says: "I now regret that decision". What a surprise.

I wish I could buy stuff for reasons like these...

Re:SWEET!

[CountBrass]

No! "Synch'" is a term for not having to piss around with cli tools but instead I can just plug in my pda and it just synchs. That's how it should work.

The presence of hacking tools is just a bonus: not a substitute for synch'-ing.

April Fools?

[Anonymous Coward]

For a minute there, I thought that Slashdot had replaced all of its pages with "500 Internal Server Error" as an April Fool's joke...

My kinda testing!

[FunWithHeadlines]

"The SL-6000 is designed to be more rugged than common handhelds, and can withstand a drop from approximately 1 meter. "

Can I be on that test team? Just goes to show, there's QA testing and then there's QA testing. "Debug code? Bah! I wanna drop things!"

Re:My kinda testing!

[Dimensio]

It also can apparently survive being drenched with water, provided that you dry it out before turning it on.

Friend of mine had one next to a leaky air conditioner. Well, six feet. The thing really needs replacing. Got soaked, got dried, still works.

Re:My kinda testing!

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

Got soaked, got dried, still works.

Sounds like the last few years of my drinking career...

Flip that...

[CrypticSpawn]

That is a price of a cheap laptop.

Re:Flip that...

[boisepunk]

I own a Zaurus SL-5500: the "original" US market unit (as opposed to the original developer's unit, the SL-5000, which was basically the same thing with half the RAM). I'll say this: you can have it... when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

Two reasons it rocks:

• The keyboard. The primary reason this is 10x more efficient than (most) palm devices: I can type very quickly on the build-in "hidden" keyboard. Yes, the Zaurus has something like PalmOS's Graffiti. In fact, the Z's recognizer is more sophisticated and accurate, and can learn any strokes you teach it. I still use the keyboard.
• Linux. No, I do not use my Z as a "hacking tool" or "geek toy" primarily. I've written a test app for it or so, but that's it. (Doing so is incredibly easy, actually, but I haven't had a lot of time to spend on it.) I bought my Zaurus as a PDA, and that's what I use it for. Since I use Linux exclusively on the desktop, having it on the PDA is extremely natural, not to mention making things extremely flexible. I find syncing silly. I prefer ssh, scp, or (with the newer ROM) smbclient (which is like a braindead ftp, but it works). If I needed syncing, I would use rsync. It just fits very naturally into my work environment.

Some people complain about the PIM apps; the quality varies. The Todo List and Address Book aren't great, but I don't use the former and the latter is sufficient. The Text Pad, however, is pretty handy, and Opera (which even renders slashdot well!) and Hancomsheet (a fully-blown spreadsheet!) are killer apps for me.

The only reason I don't upgrade to a CL-760 is the fact I can't justify the cost: my Z works great as-is. With the work on OpenZaurus and Opie, the PIM issues are being solved, and I have little chance of being left with a "dead" platform.

must be a good PDA

[victorvodka]

considering that none of that $699 pays for an OS

Re:must be a good PDA

[zgornz]

Actually the $699 is all to pay for an OS, it goes straight to SCO, Sharp must be giving these things away for free....

Re:must be a good PDA

[KatTran]

considering that none of that $699 pays for an OS

Sharp does have to pay an undisclosed amount of money to TrollTech to use the Qtopia interface.

From Qtopia Pricing page

For prices, conditions and licensing terms on building a Qtopia device, please contact Trolltech Sales to discuss available packages.

Re:must be a good PDA

[XorNand]

considering that none of that $699 pays for an OS

A licensing fee may not have been paid, but I think I can safely say that silicon doesn't spontaniously sprout OSS. Someone was paid to intergrate the OS into this device. Odds are that cost was passed onto the end-user. Additionally, I'd like to clarify another point: free != good.

Keyboard

[AnonymousCowheart]

"Sharp has also incorporated a sliding thumb keyboard into this model."

Didnt all the 5x00 series have the same type of keyboard?

Sorry, but looks count....

[}InFuZeD{]

Does anyone else notice that these Sharp PDAs are less-than-beautiful in case design?

I'm not highly impressed with either the case design OR the OS design, but the case in particular.

Look at the Sony Clie NX series modles, the Tungsten E, etc. Those are some nice looking handhelds. The Sony Launcher also LOOKS nice.

Sorry, but when I see pictures of these Sharp PDAs, they just don't excite me. The only upside is the VGA screen.

I'll definitely be looking out for VGA Palm units in the near future though, those should be great :)

Demand

[slimak]

Really, what is the demand for a product like this? The price alone sets this way above what the average consumer should be willing to pay. Sure there are the "power users", the technophites and the "too wealthy to cares" who this is perfect for, but what about the rest of us? Seems like another case of a product with too high a price for the features that will be frequently used.

Re:Demand

[bogie]

I dunno, what's more useful? A PDA/micro-notebook you can use to manage your entire business/life,play games, surf the web, use email, run X apps, listen to music etc for $699 or an Ipod that you listen to music on but can cost $500? Somehow everyone here seems to think its worth it for a pleasure item like an Ipod why isn't it useful for something you can do so much more with?

Like Apple users are always telling me, if you have to question the value of something based on price you weren't part of the target market to begin with.

Free hardware

[bakes]

The hardware is actually free, the $699 is to cover the Linux license.

Score: -1, Cheap SCO gag

Re:Free hardware

[LqqkOut]

I guess Bill Gates was right after all!

Re:The last "real" story?

[LqqkOut]

I can't wait for the "official stories", here are a few, from a secret MS-Word doc invisible ink:

/. effect expands as readers actually view articles SCO group apologizes to Linus - "We've been insensitive clods" Soviet Russia welcomes W2k3 as national OS

Funny how I was always on spring break when 4-1 came around!

Open Zaurus

[I_Want_This_ID]

Open Zaurus is going to have some fun with this one.

It's a tad on the pricey side though as an SL-5500 can be had for under $200 and the SL-5600 (which has the 400 MHz xscale proc and 64 MB of RAM) is under $400 last time I checked

Re:Open Zaurus

[megan_of_wutai]

Just a little correction.

The 5500 has 64MB RAM (all of which can be used with OZ if you have a flash card) and 16MB internal flash . The 5600 has 32MB RAM and 64MB internal flash, the internal flash is faster than an SD or CF card but personally I think they made the wrong choice with it. The SL-6000 also uses a PXA-255 which was basically released as a bug fix for the PXA-250 (that the 5600 uses) which had several bugs (cache and pcmcia I seem to recall).

The SL-6000 is much better of course :), with 64MB of both (although I seem to recall a marketing pdf with several different models, one of which had 128MB of flash, others didn't have the 802.11b and some had BT in addition, they don't seem to be offering that choice here).

Of course this is all coming from a happy SL-5500 owner who doesn't need any newfangled XScale ;)... I'd kill for the screen though.

I'd still take my 860

[stuffman64]

I recently purchased a Zaurus SL-C860 from Dynamism, and it is truely a device I can't live without. Sure, it was pretty expensive at around $850, but no other pda I've ever used can touch it in terms of speed, style, and overall "coolness." Hell, I'm running an X11-based ROM on it now, and nearly all X apps can be recompiled to run on it.

I think I like the clamshell layout better than the traditional vertical PDA layout of this and the 5X00 series. Being able to quickly convert between mini-laptop mode and PDA mode is more useful than I'd ever imagined it would be. If I were to suggest a PDA to anyone, I'd say the SL-C760 is the better bet, as it costs the same as the 6000 and is nearly identical to the 860 (the 860 has a slightly larger screen, all-silver case and better default software, which is only helpful if you are japanese!).

Sure, the 7XX and 8XX series do not have the built-in wireless, but the coolness factor of the design, and the fact that almost nobody in the US has one, make it the better choice (IMHO).

nice, but i'd really like

[whovian]

to see 802.11g and USB 2.0 standard jack. Or do those suck too much power?

I'm surprised that the Sharp web site doesn't list this product yet. But this page spells out a few more specs.

Re:699? i can get a laptop for this

[rusty0101]

Well, let's see, 400 mhz, xscale processor. Not sure off hand how that measures in bogomips, but I am reasonably sure someone will chime in with it's rating, and someone else will chime in with how useless it is as a measure of a processor.

Touch screen. Not absolutely sure, but don't recall any laptops with that, much less at a $700 price. Tablets seem to still be running in the $1600 range, so I suppose you could pay double this for a larger screen, etc.

Instant on, no waiting for the hard drive to power up, spin up, then transfer a memory image to memory, calculate adjustments to date and time, etc.

Fits in your pocket, pretty much any text mode program is a re-compile away, if it was compiled to begin with. You may need to install a python library or two, but you would probably have to do that for your laptop as well.

Acceptable battery life. The only thing that comes close laptop wise to either of my 5500s is my iBook, and even that I generally leave plugged in. Your milage may vary.

Works well as simply a PDA. I like mine as an alternate MP3 player (256Meg of a 512Meg cf card filled with music is a reasonable amount of music.) And it still fits in your pocket.

I happen to think IQNotes is one of the better quick jot applications for keeping track of things. Sketch, write, grab an e-mail address, whatever. Great for those shopping lists that you want to re-use, or those lists of books to consider picking up next time you are at the library. So far as I know it's only available on the Zauraus so far. (pretty sure it will be ported, or copied to other platforms in time.)

But then I'm probably biased. I can't claim it is worth all of $699, in that I only own earlier models, and haven't played with this one.

-Rusty

PDAs Arent Cutting it For Me

[artlu]

I loved my SL-5500 PDA from sharp for about 2 weeks, and then tossed it in a drawer along with my Palm IIIx and Newton. I am sure that there are many out there that love PDAs, but my cell phone has done everything I have ever needed out of a PDA. I'd rather spend the $700 and get the Sony Ericsson P800 phone with the megapixel cam, etc!

Maybe when we have star trek like PDAs that will analyze everything about my surroundings i'd be more receptive.

The Zaurus is not a pda

[secondsun]

My Zaurus is not a PDA but a PDT (Person Digital Tool), and anyone who says otherwise is getting a foot in their arse.

A PDA is a glorified address book that plays music and sells for 300$. My Zaurus (SL-5500) costs less than 200, runs a mobile X-11 server, allows for quick coding (802.11b CF card + ssh) when I am off campus and can't log into something heavy, plays movies, serves webpages, and runs Linux. The Zaurus is very hackable and has a high fun value attached to it. $699 is alot to spend for it, but in 6 months you can ebay one for about 300 which would be more inline.

Re:Cool widget, but WTF would buy it?

[major.morgan]

Why...

$50 premium over the top of the line iPaq (and only because it is brand-new), similar specs on mainboard, much better screen, flexibility of a REAL OS with a mulitude of opensource apps.

Bad Ass PDA = $699
Open Source Flexibility = Priceless

Re:699? i can get a laptop for this

[Tet]

The 5500 has all of the above except the 400 mhz xscale processor, and can be had "new in original packaging" for less than $200 if you keep your eyes open on e-bay.

True, but it doesn't have the screen. I have both an SL-5500 and a SL-C860. The 860's screen is so much better it's really not funny. It has to be seen to be believed. It's an amazingly crisp display, and at 640x480, it's able to give me an 80x24 text console, which the 5500 couldn't manage even with the smallest font size. Sharp are coming so close to making the perfect machine. The only thing lacking from the 860 is builtin bluetooth -- I have to use a separate CF card for that (I'd rather be putting extra storage in that slot). Now the 6000 has all the features, but for reasons that I don't understand, has reverted to the sliding keyboard form factor, rather than the clamshell design of the 860. If they could just put the 6000 in a clamshell case with the larger keyboard, I'd be very happy indeed...

Get a Nokia 92x0 instead.

[Moderation abuser]

You get the lot in a single package. The best PDA OS and UI in the market, hundreds of third party applications and the phone is integrated right into the system. The cost sans connection is $699. If you get a connection with it, $50. Use the other $650 for something else.