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Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 Today?

Posted by timothy on from the mine-still-works-well dept.

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."

2 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Just Sold Mine by rmjohnso · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  2. If you're getting a Zaurus, read this by Adam9 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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