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."

Comments

Linux is great..

[dcstimm]

But you need to be ultra competitive feature wise for a Linux enabled pda to take off. I am a linux nut and I see no need for a PDA that runs linux on it. hell maybe if it had a ethernet jack on it and a full size keyboard, oh wait thats a laptop...

Re:Linux is great..

[radish]

PocketPC is Windows in name only, there's very little common ground from a code point of view.

My question is this: Why should the consumer care what OS is on the device? Why should they pay a premium for an alternative OS? People buy PDAs by functionality and if your Linux/PocketPC/PalmOS/whatever based solution doesn't have the right functionality it won't (and doesn't deserve to) survive.

Personally, I used to be a Palm boy but not have an iPaq 4155, which is tiny, and has built in bluetooth and wifi. Yes it's less reliable than the palm and obviously has worse battery life. But the wireless options and screen quality sell it to me. Personally I couldn't give a monkey's what OS it runs provided I can sync to my desktop PC, and run my GPS nav software.

Price

[fembots]

As stated, people don't seem to be willing to pay a premium for gadgets and alternative systems.

Moving people from MS to Linux is difficult enough because of the technical differencesalone, and did I mention the OS is free?

So why would people pay more money to try Linux?

If a PDA costs $400 running Windows, people already have the perception that a Linux-based PDA should cost $200 less because the OS is free.

Sharp never really tried in the US anyway

[wobedraggled]

I had a Zaurus when they first came out over here (5000d) and it was a great little gadget with great potential, but Sharp hardly pushed it over here at all, and never brought over the much nicer and sleeker Clamshell design. You get what you pay for, and you sell what you push. Bye bye Sharp at least one us will miss you.

PDA Needs

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw the zaurus and I must admit that I was impressed. Unfortunately the price tag wasn't something I could afford. Anyone know a decent low-cost PDA with built-in keyboard, adequate speed/memory/storage, runs linux and can go wireless? Preferrably something that would sync up with kmail or evolution or something like that, too.

I'm in the demographic that can't quite justify an expensive PDA but if there's a relatively cheap one that has all the "geeky" linux capabilities, I'd probably get one.

Why the Zaurus failed

[perlow]

I was the Developer Liasion at Sharp during 2002-2003 and I wrote a peice in Linux Magazine in May of 2004 about why the Zaurus failed. The short of it? Sharp had no clue about dealing with the Open Source community.

http://www.linux-mag.com/2004-05/hard_01.html

As another person mentioned upthread, there are -other- Linux handhelds in the works, some coming out by major companies. Lets just hope they aren't doomed to repeat the same mistakes.

Sharp Repair Dept ruined a 3500 unit sale

[TheMCP]

As a senior software manager, I was responsible for selecting a PDA OS to standardize on at a small university in Boston last year. (I also had the option of deciding that none were good enough yet and examine the market again later.) I looked at the Palm devices and determined they were nice but didn't quite meet requirements. (And, their people didn't return my calls, which does not help form a business relationship.) I was given a WinCE pda/smartphone by the university (free, to keep), winced at how awful the software was, and gave it back. An article here on slashdot mentioned the zaurus, and I found one at a good price, decided that regardless of what would be best for the university, it was what I wanted for me. So, I bought one for me, and used myself as a guinea-pig.

I loved it. It was GREAT! In addition to being plenty fun for me to toy with, it was everything I wanted our students to have, and then some. I figured I'd toy with it a while longer before putting in the order for thousands of units... and then it broke.

Okay, these things happen. It was just a hardware button not working. That's repairable, right? So I sent it in for warranty service. I figured, this is just an opportunity to see how fast their repair service is before placing the order. I guessed the contacts were probably just corroded from the humid salt air of Boston, and this would be a good simple test of their repair department.

They sent it back to me un-fixed. Oh, and they'd wiped my data. (Fortunately nothing important was on it, I was more toying with it than anything.) So, I phoned to complain. They basically told me, in very polite language, that nothing was wrong with it and I'm an idiot who doesn't know how to use a button. But, there it was, in my hand, and the button still didn't work.

Sharp lost an immediate sale of 3500 to 4000 units, plus ongoing sales for incoming students, faculty, and staff, plus an ongoing repair contract with the university.

I took a jeweler's screwdriver and disassembled the relevant parts of the unit. The problem turned out to be corrosion on the contacts for the button. 20 seconds with a pencil eraser and it was fixed. Yet, Sharp repair apparently couldn't find that problem. Oh well, their loss.

And the university? Well, since I'd decided that no PDAs were yet acceptable, they bought some faculty and some staff Windows XP tablet computers... which I didn't like, but which did meet the requirements.

Sharp has some great tech. I'd LOVE to have one of their 3D displays, and a newer model Zaurus... but this is not the first time I've had a nasty run-in with their repair department, so I'm not going to be buying anything from Sharp any time soon. I can't say if I'm a representative customer or not, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if lack of repeat business is a substantial part of why Sharp isn't doing so well in the US computer market.

Why The Open Source Community Failed The Zaurus

[Ilan Volow]

Here's a letter to Linux magazine I wrote in response to the above linked article, which was printed in the Augest edition of Linux magazine. As Linux magazine doesn't publish letters in the archive, I'll have to republish my letter in the post.

Our Way Is The Hard Way

The analysis of the Sharp Zaurus' failure in May's "The Hard Way" column is a textbook example of how we in the Open Source community blow it big time on usability issues and then blame the lack of mass adoption on "evil" proprietary companies like Sharp.

A successful PDA for the masses should minimize the number of taps required to perform a task. However, for every tap on my Palm, I had to do 2-3 more taps in the Qtopia applications on my Zaurus. Qtopia buttons and menus also took up needless screen real estate--real estate the designer of the Palm user interface was smart enough to conserve.

A successful PDA for the masses has a developer community that understands how to minimize taps and screen real-estate use. Palm developers get it. Zaurus developers, on the other hand, would constantly tell me "It's not a 'usability problem', you're just familiar with the Palm UI."

A successful PDA for the masses has a user community that rants and raves about how they can organize stuff and plan out their day with a few taps of their styli. The Palm had this. The Zaurus had a user community that ranted and raved about how they could run a terminal on their PDA to ssh into servers.

We in Open Source often hurt mainstream adoption more than any proprietary company ever could. It's time we realize this and stop blaming others for the problems of our own making.

While the Open Source community did significantly hurt the user experience of the Zaurus, in all fairness some of that blame also belongs to Sharp. For example, they left the power button exposed and uncovered by the flip-down visor, which often results in the Zaurus getting turned on while it's still in your pocket and the battery being kaput the second you whip it out.

I think that whether future handhelds will be successful depends on whether they are "Linux Handhelds" guided primarily by Unix design values or "Handhelds That Just Happen To Run Linux" that are guided primary by PDA/Ergonomic values.