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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."
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.
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
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.