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."

Comments

A few questions.

[Tuxedo Jack]

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?

Re:A few questions.

[stuffman64]

First off, no USA on this device. Like the SL-CXXX series (I own an 860 myself), they will not be brought to America, though if you want one, you can import them from companies like Dynamism. Since it is essentially the same as the other Zaurus' hardware, I'm sure any of the kernels/ROMS currently available for it, but they are all Linux and all pretty good.

As for educational discounts, only in your dreams... or if you lived in Japan. Dynamism wants a cool $899 for it (I paid $850 for my SL-C860, and I think it's worth it).

Lastly, there are current VoIP for the Zaurus (KPhone comes to mind), so it should work with this model. The 4GB drive will come most in handy for the numerous emulators available (there are emulators for just about every pre-playstation console, and even a SCUMM emulator to play those classic LucasArts games [and rumors of a PS1 emulator abound]).

But you have to ask yourself if $900 is worth it for a PDA with very little support over here in the US. For most, it will be a "no," but for the true Linux-loving uber-geek, there is nothing better. Alternately, you can try the Zaurus SL-6000L (with full support here in the US). It's only $499 now at Amazon. Sure, it doesn't have the 4GB drive, but it works pretty much the same, except it lacks the cool clamshell design.

Zaurus is dead

[Dancin_Santa]

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.

Re:Zaurus is dead

[Michael Spencer Jr.]

no support? What are you smoking?

I don't suppose people who buy Sharp laptops have to get all their software from Sharp too, do they? Do all Dell laptop owners buy all their software and games from Dell?

Sharp will honor their warranty. That's all they need to do. You can get all kinds of software for this device from other sources, as long as you have the hardware.

--Michael Spencer (An SL-C700 owner, considering buying this SL-C300)

Re:Zaurus is dead

[hklingon]

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.

Re:Zaurus is dead

[sakusha]

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.

Features

[allden]

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?

A little wider, please.

[tji]

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.

Enough of the US

[enginuitor]

That's it, I'm moving to Japan!

PDAs and the market

[British]

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.

Re:Looks cool

[Trejkaz]

Inflated prices... but at least it's available. ;-)

State of the PDA market

[echocharlie]

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...

Re:Fristy

[michaeldot]

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!)

Zaurus Community

[dangerz]

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

Re:Zaurus Community

[gullevek]

The right URL is www.openzaurus.org not .com .

and same for the second. They are all org not .com

corrected URLs:
http://www.openzaurus.org
http://www.pdaxrom.org

push the envelope!!!

[bstadil]

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.

Re:Fristy

[CyberDave]

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.

Re:VGA out

[RevAaron]

There is a CF card you can buy for the Zaurus that lets you do presentations over VGA. However, there is only one program that supports it and it doesn't show PDFs. The program is Hancom Mobile Presenter. You cannot use the VGA out for any Zaurus app, unfortunately.

Re:Bandwidth Limit Exceeded

[conics]

sorry for any inconvinience.

bandwidth has been increased to the conics site now.