Zaurus SL-5600/SL-5500 Comparison Whitepaper

Bill Kendrick writes "A cool as the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 Linux-based PDA is, there are definitely some quibbles about battery life, software and syncing. Fortunately, it seems the folks at Sharp and TrollTech have been working on it for the new 5600 model. Sharp just posted a whitepaper (PDF) comparing the two models. (Newer kernel, no more root-privs-for-everything, JFFS2, dropping slow XML for PIM stuff, and USB-IO syncing, to name a few.)"

Re:Non-root privileges?

[rusty0101]

There are several servers available for the Z, including but not limited to ftp, apache, and samba. With both ftp and samba, since you are effectively root, there is noting preventing joe random hacker from downloading, editing and uploading your /etc/ files and making the device do lots of things you would otherwise not be planning on.

Who needs a root-kit if the device does everything as root?

-Rusty

Re:Non-root privileges?

[GoofyBoy]

Its a PDA. It just needs to do very simple tasks. If you are asking it to do more, you really should get a serious computer/laptop.

Re:Battery comparison

[rusty0101]

speculation would be that the xscale processor supports operational modes that the strongArm processor does not (shutting down parts of the processor that are not in use, idle sleep, etc) and the fact that the two processors run at very different speeds, which affects anything else running on the processor buffers.

-Rusty

Re:OpenZaurus is better

[krow]

Personally I found that Open Zaurus:
1) Crashed more often
2) Email application was more primitive
3) The backup didn't work at all
4) The application to install packages looked nicer but screwed up for more often.

I went back to using the normal ROM's for this reason.

Maybe someday...

Re:The C700 is much nicer

[n1ywb]

You know those products were on the market and still would be except that Americans weren't buying them. I wish they still were. I'm sort of considering buying a Jornada 720 to run Linux. I did just buy a Zaurus. I can actually type fairly quickly on it's keyboard, although obviously not the 80wpm I can type on a normal keyboard. It's also kind of a pain to type anything other than letters.

The thing is, most Americans aren't interested in sub-notebooks and palmtop computers. They want electronic datebooks, so that's what Palm and MS give them. When Americans buy computers, they want BIG BEEFY AMERICAN COMPUTERS WITH HUGE AMOUNTS OF STORAGE AND THE FASTEST CPUs. Sounds a lot like the American automobile market vs. the Japanese.

Me, I wish I'd bought a Jornada 720 or something similar when I started college, so I could write code in class. Frankly I hate handwriting recognition. My handwriting sucks. And the screens on pocket pc's is just too small and narrow for real text editing. The 640x240 screens on the original win CE machines was much better, IMO. Of course if manufacturers would just turn their pocket PCs 90 degrees... I think that would be a much better form factor. I'd rather be able to read a line of text without wrapping, and scroll a little more often.

PDAs are still cutting edge. I think we'll be seing a lot of changes in the coming years.