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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."

7 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Looks cool by rshimizu12 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The Zaurus SLC-3000 looks very cool where can I get one.....??? Too bad Sharp decided to quit distributing the Zaurus in the US

    1. Re:Looks cool by chewy_2000 · · Score: 1, Interesting
      Not surprisingly, the submitter seems to sell them on his web site, hence the submission.

      Free (?) advertising to a massive target market must be a grand thing.

  2. A little wider, please. by tji · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  3. PDAs and the market by British · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. State of the PDA market by echocharlie · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Now that Sharp and Sony are no longer devloping PDA products for the US market, I find the major innovators are now gone. Now PalmOne and all the PocketPC vendors have no incentive to push the envelope. It's a shame really...

    --
    AnimeNEXT anime convention
  5. Re:Zaurus is dead by hklingon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The HP 100LX / 200LX was essentially abandoned by HP with similar reasoning. HP came out with the 320LX, a WinCE device. Yet, the 200LX persists to this very day. (A decade+later)

    I think Sharp dumping the USA market makes perfect business sense. The average american consumer is just too ignorant for the C7xx/C860/C3000 line of PDAs. Most folks want something that 'just works.' They are ignorant of cross-compiling, and probably find the lack of a unified (stable) software set annoying at best.

    The nicest thing about the 200LX was the software suite was extremely well designed and put together. For me, the 200lx 'just worked' right of of the box for everything I needed it for, and it was completely painless to make it do more. The Zaurus pales in comparison, but with a little diligence I think I can get it where I want it. It isn't much fun trying to port or fix botched ports of the software you want.

    You may be right that this will be the last good PDA model Sharp makes.. but after carrying my 200LX for just over a decade, I've found my successor.

    Just as before, the average consumer did not want a DOS palmatop in a sea of (then extremely crappy) WinCE devices. They want something that just works.

    Me? I'm having a very good time cross-compiling things for the Arm, porting scripts and utilities and really turning this PDA into an ultra-portable laptop. I almost have a dos emulator running at a nice speed. I doubt that most folks want to do this stuff. Most of the techies I work with want a PDA that 'just works'. I can't say that I blame them, but I want another 10-year PDA.

    I suspect this device will have the same cult following as the 200LX does, even though the software is a bit rocky with all the variations in the Zaurus famuly. I can only hope it persists for a decade.

  6. Zaurus Community by dangerz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    We've been hearing rumors about this for a while over at the ZUG. I dont know how much I like it though.

    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 :) We're currently building a Zaurus Software Index to help make it easier for people to download the software they need.

    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