Zaurus Sharp SL-C3000 Tested, Converted to English
conics writes "Sharp Japan released a new Zaurus October 15th. There were some on display at WPC2004 Tokyo. Pictures of the Sharp SL-C3000 tested in English;
specs of the SL-C3000."
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The Zaurus SLC-3000 looks very cool where can I get one.....??? Too bad Sharp decided to quit distributing the Zaurus in the US
And now when is this coming out over here in the US?
Can we swap OSes on it to something else (I know, it's Linux, why would you want to, et cetera).
What'll it run, and can educators get discounts on it somehow?
And it's got a PHS in it - can we expect to see some sort of VoIP software for it when it gets ported over here?
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Caveat: I owned a Zaurus 5500, the review of which was even posted to the front page of Slashdot.
USB host, HD and big color screen will suck battery. Keyboard will be useful, but its not a real keyboard. Is Sharp trying to shrink a laptop to unusability (sucky KB), or is it expanding a PDA to unportability (no battery life). Is the market for this type of laptop/PDA hybrid big enough to support this?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
That thing does look mighty fine.. But what would be the advantage of this over a high powered pocket pc??
And whats with that guys hairy fingers?!!?
Call me and my voicemail! 914-713-6795. (wow, I have the balls to post my voip number on
Basically, Sharp has decided that the PDA market is not expanding fast enough to allow room for more than three fundamentally different platforms in the handheld space. Microsoft pushes the PocketPC. Palm has their little OS. And Sharp was the Linux holdout. I guess there were others like the BlackBerry, but in terms of market size they are non-starters.
But with the market reaching saturation, the only thing Sharp can do, really, is get the hell out and cut their losses. This C3000 is the last in their series.
BUT!! Look for more feature-filled Sharp phones in the future. The cellular phone market is still expanding and the 3G Smartphone/Featurephone market is largely untapped so far. It doesn't take a genius to see how moving the PDA OS to a smaller form factor which EVERYONE wants is good business sense.
The thing you want to ask yourself now is whether getting a pretty nice PDA now is worth it considering you won't have any support for it after a year.
a) Doesn't talk about bluetooth b) No inbuilt wireless c) I bet the price won't be less than $600 Why should a non-geek buy Zaurus and not a Sony?
If anyone is looking out for this, prepare to shell out a really shiny penny, as you won't see this in the US.
don't look for it in the US anytime soon. see link
That's not a bad looking device. The small LCD display does a nice job with the ebay page they showed in the pictures. But, I still think that to make it a really usable device for WWW browsing, they need to make the screen a bit bigger.
There is plenty of space availble with all that plastic on both sides of the display.
That's it, I'm moving to Japan!
I'm going to try something different with this troll.
I'm going to try to turn this thread ontopic.
Maybe this guy posted the message from a Zaurus. I assume this is possible, correct me if I'm wrong...
Anyone else think that the "Zaurus" text on the bottom looks a bit like it was done in Apple Garamond (Apple's serif font which they use for branding)?
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
I am still dumbfounded why new PDAs are released it seems every week. I bought my Handspring Visor 2 years ago(still use it), only to find support for it was pulled rather shortly after I bought it. I was hoping to just walk into any brick & mortar store and buy a keyboard or module for it. But alas, no.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
move. We don't need you griping. Goodbye karma, but i think my point matters.
AnimeNEXT anime convention
h++p://www.bargainpda.com/default.asp?newsID=2082
Sony is leaving the US PDA market too.
done in Apple Garamond (Apple's serif font which they use for branding)?
You're out of date: Apple haven't used Garamond for quite a while, probably since Microsoft started using it for product packaging.
I *think* Apple's current font is Lucida Grande, a sans-serif font that has a modern, 21st century feel. (Guess what Microsoft will be using in 5 years!)
does anybody know about the vga out? ideally, i would like to present PDFs done in XGA resolution, or at least in SVGA. probably i have to wait 1-2 ipod generations to get this properly done...
We've been hearing rumors about this for a while over at the ZUG. I dont know how much I like it though.
:) We're currently building a Zaurus Software Index to help make it easier for people to download the software they need.
The screen is the same size as my c860 and so is the battery. The only difference are the weird colors (white/silver/chrome???) and the fact that it is bigger. As well, it also has a hard drive that is going to eat the battery.
Sharps biggest selling point is that the device includes some multimedia Japanese dictionary. Rather useless for those of us that dont need it. I think the entire dictionary takes up about 600 megs?
For now I'm very happy with my c860 and the new 2 gig sd cards are keeping me more than ok in the space area.
Anyways, on a different note, I'll take this opportunity to plug http://www.zaurususergroup.com/forums/ for those Zaurus owners that don't know about us
Some other good sites for the Zaurus:
http://www.openzaurus.com
http://www.pdaxrom.com
The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
There was a major price drop of the Zaurus SL-6000 to $399.00 on Amazon last week. Now the price of the Zaurus SL-6000 is now $499.00. Sharp is clearing the Zaurus SL-6000 but now a price rise. Maybe this is a case of supply and demand. There is a price drop, the discontinued SL-6000 is selling well enough to demand a $100 price rise.
umm, I use Adobe Caslon on my Zaurus SL-6000L, and could probably switch to Adobe Garamond Expert (which I also have) if ... only ... Caslon wasn't already so friggin' sweet!!
I understand your comment but in reality it is dead wrong. The competition is not the High-end Linux PDA etc the mortal blow to PDA's are coming from cell phones. This goes for MP3 players as well. One million MP3 enabled smart phones were sold in S. Korea las 12 month.
If the PDA makers do not push the envelope they will disappear.
The phone is the key feature you can not do without so there is a natural gravitation toward that end of the market. Include Phones in PDAs are possible but so far not been succesful.
Help fight continental drift.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One really shouldn't submit one's one bandwidth-limited site to /. before making arrangements for lots more bandwidth.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
My impression was that they thought the open source community would take care of everything for them as far as software is concerned, and they wouldn't have to lift a finger ...
In the end the only player left in the market was theKompany.
The Raven
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Apache/1.3.31 Server at www.conics.net Port 80
Just face the facts : dollar value and internaitonal support is dropping by the day, US economy is worsening the same... US market is not interesting anymore.
Although I own a 860, and I am very happy with it. This one looks neat with its internal HD. I would love to have a second one to do some Tests with various Linux Distris :)
:)
And nothing is more wonderful than to play Monkey Island in 640x480 in the morning
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
Apple's main font is currently Myriad. When I worked in the campus bookstore, I would occasionally use it in the signage I created as an homage to my favorite computer company.
Since the site is slashdotted, you'll have to see the SL-C3000 at Dynamism who will make it available to US customers in November.
Like Digital Freedoms? Then donate to EFF before they're gone.
Zaurus Software Index.
Duplication of efforts?
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Based on the number of responses to this article, no one.
Perhaps Sharp should have cared more about us.
$900 at Dynamism (U.S. based), $750 at Conics.net
Three questions:
(1) Is Conics.net based in Australia?
(2) Why the big price difference?
(3) Does Conics ship to U.S.?