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Zaurus Sharp SL-C3000 Tested, Converted to English

Posted by timothy on from the too-bad-about-the-availability dept.

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."

5 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Nice, but... by Gothmolly · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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?

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  2. Zaurus is dead by Dancin_Santa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Zaurus is dead by sakusha · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You obviously don't know how Japanese corporations work. Sharp has deep pockets, and is fully committed to keeping prestige products on sale, even if they're not making money, even if it's only limited markets (i.e. Japan only) in order to keep their name established as a market leader. And then someday the market will ripen, and they'll still be poised to make a big splash. That's how they look at it.

  3. Features by allden · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  4. push the envelope!!! by bstadil · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Now PalmOne and all the PocketPC vendors have no incentive to push the envelope

    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.

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