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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."
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...
keanmarine.com
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.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
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?
One does tend to find PDA use slightly less common behind the McDonald's counter.
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.
why bother with a big clunky PDA when i can now get the same functionality in my cellphone ?
the PDA has now been surpassed,the clever manufacturers discovered that there is no real need for it anymore, need something bigger than a cellphone, then a tablet PC should fit the bill
iam sorry to see PDA's go but thats progress for you
It seem to be a trend... Japan get all the cool toys while US (and Canada) markets show 'not enough demand'.... don't we like cool toys? Seen it happen with PDAs, Minidisc players (only some models are sold here, the coolest ones are Japan only), Cellphones...
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To date, I only have known two people who own PDAs - my boss and one of my friends. I don't even see many people at my unversity who own them - but I know a bundle who are married to their laptops. If they can't sell a gadget to college students, good luck selling it to anyone at all. My money is on pda/cellphone combos and blackberries.
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.
I don't know ANYONE who uses a pda... personally I don't think they're all that useful.
Can't seem to swing a dead cat in my office without knocking a PDA out of someones hand. They seem to like them a lot. I've personally tried several and given them all up in place of a Nokia series 60 smart phone (6620 now... used to have a 3650).
Advantage of the phone? It's always with me. I never seamed to have my PDA when I needed it the most, but since my cell phone is always in my pocket and connected to the net in some fashion or another (argue symantics all you want, but I'm always on the GSM network) I'm now always able to get the PDA data I need when I need it.
Mail? - automatically notified
Calendar? - I always get my reminders
Contacts? - are you kidding? You gotta have them in your phone anyway
Notes? - voice, text and instant photo notes (very handy when you need to copy something quickly)
Games or web on the john? - no one questions the phone since they never see it (try that with a newspapaper)
I think the real truth is Sharp saw the future and the future is everone having a PDA on their phone. If you notice, PDAs aren't really Personal Digital Assistants anymore... they're tiny computers (litterally with the OQO). The reall PDA market comes with cellular service.
TW
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.
Ubuntu- Linux for human beings.
Does this mean that (American) Dell and HP have beaten Sharp, Sony, and Toshiba (Japanese) in selling tiny consumer electronics devices in the US? That market 0wn3rship is being fought out by viciously innovating American competitors? Where are the "American Engineering Extinction" pundits while the new paradigm firmly assumes an American twang?
--
make install -not war
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.
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.
PDA's are just another gadget that gets outdated after a year. Maybe I'm growing old/less competetive, but I don't want to buy these new thingies all the time.
"How long will it last?" is the first question I ask myself, and the faster it will be outdated, the less money I'm willing to spend on it. My previous computer was a dual PII, it cost me a fortune but that money is gone. My last PC was a cheap AMD homemade, it works fine and with the money I saved I bought a telescope. I've always wanted one, and a telescope can last much longer than a PC that loses it's value instantly.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
For you maybe. I cannot read my own handwriting 80% of the time. If electronics could get close that would help. And since I can see instantly that it gets it wrong I could correct the mistake then when I still knew what I meant to write. Course I don't trust hand writing recognition to understand my scratching.
I tried a paper organizer once, ended up knowing that something once started between 9:00 and 10:30. Maybe, unless I crossed it out, hard to tell. I wasn't even sure where, 1.5 hours is a long time to spend wondering the halls, examining each conference room to see if someone realized I was wondering if this was the right one, knew I should be there, and told me to join.
Eventually my school tested me. They found that at best I can write like a second grader. That is at best. Don't tell me to practice, that is about as useful as telling someone in a wheelchair to walk. I physically cannot do better.
The point of using Linux was not to add features, but to lower the cost of the PDA: not only could Sharp avoid the Windows tax by using another OS, they could also (theoretically) reduce their specs from those required for a Windows-CE certified PDA.
Unfortunately, where Sharp could have sold an iPaq-equivalent for hundreds less, they chose to use the money saved by using Linux to add extra hardware features to the device. Thus, rather than a $100-$200 device with functionality equivalent to an iPaq, they delivered a $500-$600 device with functionality and raw performance equivalent to an iPaq, with many extra fancy features such as a full VGA display and the built-in keyboard. Nifty, but this may have been the death of them.
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.
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.
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.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
[ 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.