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Sharp Plans To Pull Zaurus From U.S. Market
Eugenia writes "Facing stiff competition and low sales, a Sharp representative has informed InfoSyncWorld that the company has decided to fully withdraw its Zaurus SL line of Linux-based handhelds from the U.S. market and focus on its home market in Japan. The recent similar withdraws of Sony and Toshiba pretty much left PalmOne and RIM fighting alone HP and Dell in a saturated PDA market inundated with U.S. brands. People don't seem to be willing to pay a premium for gadgets and alternative systems, and primarily in the corporate market customers prefer to buy from the same suppliers as for their corporate hardware."
hell maybe if it had a ethernet jack on it
Actually, it's pretty easy to put a CF Wifi card in one (I've got an SL-5500) and use it to surf the web and check email when you're out and about. They're a lot smaller than a laptop and much easier to carry around.
Oh, and full size keyboards are available.
The Zaurus line is a great one; I've had three models (5000D, 5500, 5600). However, my Treo does everything that the Zaurus can do, and comes with a phone! Since the Treo is a non-MS device, it also satisfies my desire not to support Microsoft. Of course, the Treo 650 will be even better. ;)
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I was up till recently a SL-5500 owner. It was a great PDA. However Sharp's software support was terrible. They had great hardware with great function but poor software support.
The OSS community took-up the slack the best they could by releasing revised ROMs and even roms built from the ground up like Open Zaurus.
Another issue I had was lake of sync support. The sync feature was flaky at best.
So I really think it's a bad move on sharp's part to discontinue US sales. The zaurus is one of those devices that almost was and still can be the killer device.
On a side note. The Zaurus is the best handheld I have ever used for WiFi site surveys!
What could possibly go wrong?
The Zaurus (I've got a 5500) is a cool little device. Stick a CF wifi card in it and you can check your email and surf the web when you're out on the road. It's a lot easier to pack a Zaurus than it is to pack a laptop. Most of the time the Zaurus is just fine for this purpose.
Whats the advantage of the SL 5 series over an ipaq ?
I used to have the SL5000D, it was a cool gadget, but even syncing with Linux/Evolution was a chore/pain.. and was actually done by someone else, there was no support from Sharp directly.
Secondly, the cost/market for a PDA that costs $500 is very little. How many top of the line ipaqs etc are bought ? I've seen a steady decline of models even from Compaq/HP along with Toshiba/Samsung.. maybe the smartphone market is to blame as well ?
I have an AT&T MpX200 this is an awesome phone, which syncs with an exchange server.. period. No tweaking, nothing. MS Smartphone 2003 (I upgraded, I know the default is 2002), is a great OS for a phone.
MS PocketPC Phone Edition on the other hand, sucks. I tested the HP iPAQ 6315 when it was pre-released to T-Mobile customers, for $499 the phone wouldn't even turn off when I pressed the off button. And, I had to do a hard reset on the phone 3 times in 2 days.. Needless to say, the phone was returned immediately.
The operating system alone is not a driving factor for a device to sell, QA and easy to use features are. The Zaurus 5000 was cool, but it was hard to sync, the iPAQ Phone sucks, but has really cool features.. too bad they don't work.
I'm waiting on the Motorola Linux Phones to be released in the US so I can compare them.
But, an OS alone does not sell a device.. most users do not, and should not care what OS the device is, and should not be used to advertise in marketing a brand new device. Wether the OS is free or not should also never be a factor in pricing the product.
just my HO.
Developing under cygwin for the zaurus is doable. On-device development is definitely better than ANY other handheld. More importantly, good programs have already been ported from the desktop & it is somewhat easy to do this.
It is the best handheld-computer out there.
I agree that it is a bad PDA. Not really really bad (there are great apps & the keyboard is a huge plus for data entry). The mark of a good PDA is excellent PIM software that syncs (Palm wins, but you can install good PIM software on the Zaurus & sync is great...under linux & passable under other OSs). Outstanding battery-life is a HUGE plus. To be short: if you want a PDA, get a grey-scale Palm. If you want a good toy to hack with, get a Zaurus.
[ tons of tips and ideas what's possible with a Z follow ]
The 5500 and others are more like little Linux laptops then PDAs. While I am far from a typical PDA user, the absolutely INCREDIBLE stuff I can do with just a 5500 and a wireless card continues to astound me today. To be fair, I never bought a Zaurus with the intention of ever doing typical PDA like stuff, but just wanted an easy familiar environment to hack in.
Years ago I had a USR P1000 (The Palm 1000, before Palm bought it from US Robotics), and while it was a great PDA (for the day), it was underpowered for what I wanted and most importantly LACKED A KEYBOARD, which makes all the difference in the world. One day I worked an ENTIRE day with only my P1000, a ssh client and a (9600 baud) serial link to my cell phone to see just how doable it was. As a unix admin doing security work the P1000 did have SOME uses (serial console to Sun boxes, ssh client for accessing mail via Mutt, etc) but the end result was a less than productive day overall. Trying to edit files on unix boxes with vi using Graffiti was quite painful and I vowed I'd never buy another PDA until it had at least a minimal keyboard to work with.
Fast forward to my (now several years old) 5500. Shortly after getting it I wiped the original Sharp rom and replace it with the actively developed OpenZaurus distribution, and was very happy with the results.
I have a very portable linux box with wireless, nearly all the software I was using on Solaris and Linux, as well as the pretty Qtopia apps and a half-way decent environment. I've been able to get nice tools like nmap, p0f (Passive OS Fingerprinter), Kismet, and other excellent unix based tools working with minimal effort on the Z under OpenZaurus (and the a lesser extent the Sharp ROM). Under OZ I can compile and run MANY common exploit tools like the awesome Metasploit framework, which require perl, and to a less extent Python. Both are no big deal to get going on the Z, especially since the Z is binary compatible with the IPAQ based Familiar distribution, and usually just needs the odd library to get an app working. That's all fine for text based apps, but since OZ (using Opie, at least) is QT and not X based, a variety of GUI based apps don't easily run. There ARE solutions to getting X based apps to run with minimal fuss, including the original x11zaurus package, and more recently the excellent X/QT package, as well as simply running one of the versions of the vncserver for Zaurus which of course allows you to display X not only on your Z, but also on any other VNC compatible device (such such as you cell phone, Linux, Windows, etc).
More recently the GPE environment and projects has become available, and is offers an attractive alternative to Opie, but with X11 compatibility built in.
For me, I joined the Debian religion ~5-6 years ago after experimenting to see what all the fuss on /. was all about. It
didn't take long before I was the typical Debian crack addict
apt-getting any application I wanted to check out on a
whim. After living in Ottawa for years I was very well aware of the
Corel
(and later Rebel.com (who themselves were called Hardware Canada
previously, and were a unix reseller) Netwinder
, which was a cool little ARM based PC, which unfortunately suffered
under the idiocy of Corel's managem
-- I speak only for myself.