PDA Buyer's Guide Reviews The Sharp Zaurus SL-6000

Tong Zhang writes "PDA Buyer's Guide has published an in-depth review of the Sharp Zaurus SL-6000. If you like livin' large, this super-sized Linux PDA may be just the ticket. Sharp targets the enterprise rather than consumers with this Zaurus model, which looks like an SL-5600 on steriods. It has an amazing VGA display, a 400 MHz processor, thumb keyboard, WiFi and more. Read the full review." This adds just a bit more information to the previously mentioned review at BargainPDA.

Comments

Correct Link

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather than the empty link (href="") in the story, this is the correct link to the previous story on the Zaurus SL-6000.

Also, the BargainPDA article, directly, is here.

Another PDA for ya..

[tarunthegreat2]

and this one's much cheaper, and yes, it runs Linux. Simputer

Pricing ?

[polyp2000]

The one thing I dont understand is the high cost of certain Linux based PDA's. Given the cost saving on the operating system licensing surely that should be passed onto the consumer. The hardware itself isnt radically different from PocketPC based devices which in general cost less. Sooner or later I'll be in the market for a PDA but i dont think I should have to pay extra for the privelege of not having to use a Microsoft based one.

The real question is out of the newer specification PDA's which ones can be re-flashed with Linux and work as well as the sharp offering ? I suppose a palm based device might be an alternative but i want my bash shell and dev tools to boot .

I've got SL-C860

[Anonymous Coward]

I've ordered an 860 from shirtpocket(.co.uk). This is clamshell model sold only in Japan, but Shirtpocket guys have made really good job on translating it to Engslih. However, I've moved to Cacko ROM. It is an amazing PDA, best of everything I had or still have (such as Garmin iQue, an superb Palm OS PDA + GPS). Simply put, this *is* a laptop you can put in your pocket (although a bigger one). It's got 640x480 screen, SD and CF slots (I have a WiFi card there), and it connects via USB to act both as USB host and P2P network interface. There's a LOT of software there and several flavors of ROM images. You can even make your own Linux distro for it. There's that PDAXROM for geeks: you get the login prompt, log in, then type startx to get GUI, the real GUI with moving, resizeable windows, just like you on your PC. I have perl and python there, there are several IDE environments, Java and GCC. It can be overclocked, in which case you can use mplayer to view full-screen movies in 25fps. The keyboard is small, but you can get used to thumb typing in a short time. Yes, you can make swap files to get extra memory as well. While the PDA functions aren't quite impressive, you can put Korganizer there and get pretty decent results. If the mail app isn't worth it, install Mozilla Thunderbird and have a go. Yup, you can put GIMP there, Apache as well. PHP just goes with that. And what would it be without MySQL? You can install it too...

This really is a Geek dream come true. :) It isn't for the faint of the heart, for it does need some knowledge to hack it, and flashing ROM in a wrong way can render it unusable, and you get no support outside of Japan. This is a hacking toy, the best I've seen so far.

Oh, and the geekiest of the geeky things: I've shown it to Ken Coar while he was wisiting Croatia, and guess what - he was jealous! :-)

comparison survey of all SHARP Linux PDAs

[wehe]

Here is a comparison chart of the SHARP Zaurus Linux PDA series. The survey contains also the internal code names for the PDAs, which are taken from dog races (Collie, Boxer, Poodle, ..).

Re:Developer Resources?

[wytcld]

See www.pdaXrom.org, this article on cross-compiling, Gentoo for Zaurus, the Zaurus Software Index, the Zaurus Message Board, Zaurus.spy.org, and last but definitely least the Zaurus User Group (which among much else has active discussion of where to buy the clamshells from).