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Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 Today?
TheAdmin writes "A few years ago the first Linux-based Zaurus, the SL-5500, was released for some $600 by Sharp. Today, it only costs $140 in some places online. This article at TuxTops reviews the 5500 from the point of view of trying to figure out how this model fares against today's PDAs and if it's still a good purchase after all these years, especially at this low price. And so I bought one recently because I needed a full-fledged pocket Linux at my workplace where I work as an admin. I just added a $30 Linksys WCF12 WiFi card (works out of the box after upgrading the SL-5500 ROM to version 3.10) which I use with SSH and by utilizing Zaurus' thumb-board. Works great and it's much more portable than a laptop, especially when all you need is some email and SSH on the go."
I can't decide if the Sharp Zaurus is the 3rd or the "4rth" one.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
Unlike the more popular x86 platforms, this has never been the object of upgrades ;( I would love to hear about what new stuff could be done, to revive my basement-forgotten Zaurusl. Last QT-based upgrade I had done totally killed it, in regards to functionality ...
== With enough Will Power, one could move mountains. With enough Brains, one would just leave them where they are ==
How great and modular these systems are...I've done "Linux mods" on everything I could from X-Boxen to PDA's and they always turn out for the better. I have to wonder why, besides the obvious pressure from microsoft to be "standard", more companies haven't switched to linux for mobile and embedded systems. I mean besides the obvious legal juggernaut SCO leaning over their shoulders. ;)
Marky Mark Killed Jason Bourne!
Frankly, for remote ssh and email, this does not seem like the best choice. The windows mobile, symbian or even palm-based platforms are definitely just as able (even more so) when it comes to that, while delivering much more bang for your buck. Ofcourse, then you don't get the geek cred for running linux, but, if that is your prime motivator for purchasing decisions, odds are you're throwing a lot of good money down the drain.
May I suggest you get it from the source?
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
But it always was a great little mini linux box, and now is very good value at $140. Pity about the battery life though.
I've had one for years and barely have touched it. So cool, so close, but it's flaws are enough to not make it useful at all to me.
No speaker. That sucks. The one guy I found them who sold them took my money and never shipped. (Should have just build my own)
Horrendous battery life.
Want to attach something serial? Bend over for a zcable or don't type.
It would crash every couple of days requiring a reinstall of everything.
The one time I could have used it, (on a cruise with wireless), turns out the ship's internet needed some java crap to set up the ip access. I had called ahead to the company providing service to the ship to see what I'd need and they told me everything would work. Just need an 802 card.
It has a great form factor though.
Better battery life and integrated wifi and it would have been much more handy.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
The most honest line (and a funny one, too) I've ever read in a Linux review: "[The OS on the Zaurus] is not all that stable. I had 2-3 full crashes in the last few days. Some of them could possibly be solved if you SSH to your Zaurus and kill/restart QPE, but I don't see the average businessman [doing] anything of the like." The image of an exec SSHing to his handheld is priceless. (Although, if an associate had the same Zaurus with a Terminal app, I guess it could happen... :-) )
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I actually just sold my Zaurus SL-5500 on eBay. I sold it with my Linksys WCF11 wireless card. I got about $125 for the combination, which is what I set the minimum to on eBay. I got rid of mine for a few reasons:
1. The battery life with the wireless card was horrible, and that was when the battery was new.
2. To have anything new, you had to use OpenZaurus. Not that OZ is bad, but it means that Sharp basically stopped updating anything for it. Trolltech was supposedly going to release an updated QT ROM for the 5500, but I never saw it materialize.
3. Back to the battery, it was a bit old, so it had a harder time holding a charge.
4. Getting it setup to communicate to the PC under Windows or Linux always seemed to a lot harder than it should have been. I always got it working, but it always took a while.
5. This was the big reason. I just stopped using it because of the other 4 reasons and because I almost always have my work laptop with me. I can pop my laptop out of suspend, fire up Outlook, and I have my Calendar, Address Book, e-mail, etc. just as fast. Yes, I would prefer to carry the Zaurus over the laptop, but since I always have the laptop for other work reasons, why do I need a PDA?
"Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." --Barry Goldwater
Does anyone know where Sharp tells their customer's about the GNU General Public License? Bash and Linux are licensed under this particular license. I've researched this question quite a bit and still haven't figured it out where.
"Zaurus v3.10 boots in about 65 seconds, which is a bit slower than the OpenZaurus/Opie ROM variant which loads in about 50-55 seconds."
On the other hand, the Pocket PC OS boots from scratch in under six seconds.
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
They are okay... I think it is a nice little PDA, and pretty cheap right now. Also big user group behind it who is pretty hardcore into linux.
Pros:
- CF and SD card simultaneously
- Nice screen
- Nice keyboard hiding feature
- Even if the display crashes, you can still SSH into it! And then just restart the display driver
- The linux behind the framebuffer is rock solid (uptimes of > 2 months).
- Very hackable
Cons:
- Only some CF cards work, and only SD memory cards work (not wifi SD for example). Limited support for CF chipsets (depends on manufacturer).
- Battery life tends to be a little on the low side
- Wifi card really sucks the battery dry
- Thumb keyboard is really slow for doing CLI (and painful after a few lines).
- Heavy changes in software base (like structure) right now, so the developers are breaking things almost as fast as old problems are fixed. *should* stabilize soon.
- IR PDA keyboards (like targus) kindof suck on it, I bought one but find it frustrating to type on... Press two keys are the same time and only one shows up on the zaurus, but always a surprise which one!
Wishlist:
- Longer battery
- Built in bluetooth (for external keyboard)
Seriously, any of the old Palm 4.x devices are still a "Good Investment". Unfortunatly I bought a Sony one, GREAT battery life, lousy software support (I had to ditch it since I couldn't actually get ahold of a copy of Palm Desktop that worked with it!)
Also the entire "loses everything in memory upon losing battery power" thing bit me in the butt numerious times (especially without the afore mentioned sync software).
If someone released a good 320x240 Greyscale PDA running a Palm4.x type OS that used Flash memory, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
Heck with today's silicon manufacturing processes, I can only imagine how many CENTS the CPU back in those older Palm's would cost to make now days.
Oh and the 16MB of ram wouldn't exactly cost a lot either.
I don't need an MP3 player, I don't need a video player, the e-book applications are cool though (woot!), and I don't need WiFi access. I want something that I can fit in my pocket and use to jot crud down.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I use it as a GPS and a music player in my car, and it works as a SIP phone (though the choice of codecs is limited by a slow CPU, and apparently some people have problems with making it work).
And, of course, it's a regular PDA with addressbook/calendar/todo/notes, web browser (konqueror), ssh, etc.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I wrote some VoIP with pretty pictures stuff for the Zaurus (and the Ipod) last year. I think we used an SL-6500 though.
It's a PDA but I left it plugged in at my office - and sshed to it from home and used X11 forwarding to do GUI development on it from home (it was a python GUI but the libraries were sufficiently different to mean running it on the linux desktop machine wasn't close enough).
It seemed like a good idea at the time...
I even compiled some stuff on it, when I couldn't be bothered jumping through the hoops required to cross compile a python library. Compiling on the little Zaurus while you use your P4 desktop to read email is a strange allocation of resources.
For the people posting, "zOMG, 5500 is horrible", what PDA w/ WiFi + SSH would you recommend instead?
[o]_O
I got one of these a month ago from http://www.geeks.com from $140. I wanted wireless access so I also bought a Sandisk 802.11b + 128meg CF card because it was so cheap. Since I researched ahead of time I knew that sharp has basically stopped supporting these things or providing update so my new cheap wifi card was only going to work if I replaced Sharp's software with OpenZaurus. OpenZaurus is a little ruff around the edges. If you've messed with Gentoo or ever done a Roll Your Own Distro then OpenZaurus should be a walk in the park but it's not for average Joe consumer.
I was happy to find that the OpenZaurus email app has support for IMAPS and SMTPS w/AUTH. I've about given up reading/writing word, excel, and powerpoint files because even though the Original Sharp ROMs have application to do this you can't really get them to work under OpenZaurus. But how much spreadsheet work would you do on a 320x240 device? OpenZaurus does have lots of software, it's got ipkg which you can think of as a mini-clone of apt-get or yum.
As other have said, battery life could be better(especially with the wifi card). But other then that it's cool that there are SD and CF slots. SDIO is not supported but I've got a 1gig SD card working fine. Other have complained about having to use headphones for sound, personally I don't have a problems with that.
Favorite thing done with my Zaurus so far; Walking around every corner of my apartment and scanning all the wireless networks so see what the best channel would be for my network. I've also managed to cut down alot on post-it notes.
And don't forget http://slashdot.org/palm
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
I just got my SL-5500 a week or two ago and I've had a lot of fun with it. I flashed it with OpenZaurus and bought a SD card and a Linksys CF Wifi card (WCF12) for it. I wanted to put the newest packages on it, but the package manager refused to install to my SD card. After some research, I stumbled upon the Hentges ROM. After installing that, I tried out CardFS. CardFS is a default install containing a lot of very useful programs. It's designed for people with extra storage space on their CF/SD card. It made everything much simpler. Check out the screenshots for it.
Some of the things I've done with it recently:
- Connected to my desktop via VNC
- Used GAIM at work while all of our machines were down because we were moving offices
- Used it to ssh to my machine to monitor my X10 logs while outside of the house to see the range of the X10 motion sensors
The hardware was pretty decent at the time. The new disk-based Zaurus handhelds are great (if heavy). The functionality is also nice, as are the open file formats and the Linux underpinnings.
But the problem with all of them is that the user interface on the Zaurus sucks badly. Like PocketPC, it tries to adapt desktop metaphors to handhelds, and that just doesn't work well.
As far as I'm concerned, the only PDAs with acceptable UIs at this point are Palm and Symbian. And since Palm will soon be Linux-based, I won't have to choose anymore between a good UI and a good operating system. For now, I choose a usable UI, which means I continue to use my Zire.
well, it's still not available, but it seems to be one heck of a Linux PDA. 800x480 16bit screen, dual wireless - that's wifi and bluetooth builtin. Oh, and it is supposed to be 802.g, not 802.b, as 110% of the others PDAs that have some kind of wireless access.
I wish it had a snappier CPU (200MHz ARM9) and more memory (64MB RAM). Also, CompactFlash support would be great, but it will sport RS-MMC, for compability with current Symbian Nokia phones. Or so I'm told.
A good review here: http://jkontherun.blogs.com/jkontherun/2005/06/jko ntherun_gues.html
and the official page: http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,,74866,00.html
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
I've owned or used PDAs for years (Palm III, V, M500, Tungsten), and bought the Zaurus for $140 from a friend who never used it. (My Tungsten had a high-pitched whine that made it nearly unusable, and Palm was useless in resolving it.) It was the best hardware purchase I have ever made in its class. I not only have the functionality of all of the palms I ever owned, but the added capabilities like real games, mp3s, watching movies, and especially being able to get online (I'm actually posting this from my 5500 sitting in a Paneras) give me new levels of functionality I never dreamed of with the palm.
I also do security for a living, and used the Z for wireless sniffing, vpn, and so forth. Best of all, since its Linux-based, there is an existing infrastructure of free/opensource software, much of which can be adapted to run on the Zaurus, and an excellent support community.
I'm thinking of buying a secondone in case anything happens to this one.
If you have the chance to get one and are even remotely interested in Linux, jump on it...
--Storm
usb host. this means any keyboard, and many other usb devices. the battery life is great on them, the built in keyboard is pretty good too.
the screen (at least on sl-6000) is much nicer than ive seen on pocketpc/wince/palm devices. the device itself is pretty sturdy too.
unlike any palm app, you can use keys, and even ssh-agent (on bash, but it works nicely) (this might be possible with putty on a windows handheld, never tried)
i got mine just to use as an ssh terminal. ive found it does so much now that i often dont bother with the laptop (external keyboard does nicely) the fact that i dont have to ask anyones permission to make it work however i want is a nice contrast to sony who will keep locking down thier systems or microsoft who will threaten/sue you over it. (and, yes that does influence my purchasing descision)
What I want is a pda and a fold up usb keyboard to take minutes of meetings with. No mp3. wireless nice, but not needed. Just give me good battery life and a one year warranty.
Just cannot find it.
peace, mark