Review of the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 172
Gothmolly writes "After reading the story and comments on Slashdot,
I went out and bought one from the Home Shopping Network. It's been a very fun and interesting jump into both the modern PDA (I owned the original Palm until this year) embedded Linux worlds. I've written a review about my experiences over the last few days with it. A lot of this information I found online, a lot is personal experience. HSN is now out of them, but they must still be available cheaply somewhere."
Buying a 5500 (Score:3, Informative)
I'm impatiently waiting for mine to arrive on Monday, according to UPS...
Dear God (Score:1, Informative)
I learned this the hard way when I got my sexy new Palm V three years ago, don't repeat my mistake.
A new version of Open Zaurus is out! (Score:5, Informative)
In case he's hosting it on the Zarus (Score:4, Informative)
Review of the Sharp Zaurus 5500
Ed Schernau, ed at schernau.com
No, there are no screenshots. I don't have a digital camera. It's all 1 giant page. I don't know if this works with OSX, and I don't care at the moment. It supposedly works with Linux, but I haven't tried it. This review is NOT exhaustive. All copyrights are owned by their owners, blah blah blah, I'm not trying to piss people off.
As seen here on Slashdot, the Sharp Zaurus 5500 recently went on sale at HSN due to the newer, Zaurus 5600 being released. Being a cheap geek, I purchased the 5500 model. First, I'd like to say that I was impressed with HSN - very good pricing, and a 15% off coupon for first time orders. Their website is easy to navigate and quick, and provided accurate package tracking. I paid 178USD for it, delivered.
Here's what you get in the package:
The Zaurus 5500
battery (950 mAh)
Getting started manual
User manual
CD of software and drivers
AC adapter
USB Sync cradle/charger - the cradle has a DC jack that you plug the AC adapter into - it does NOT use the USB port for charging power.
Impressions
The Zaurus looks very slick, a polished metal looking PDA. There's a translucent plastic flip-up lid over the touchscreen. The whole thing is about 1.5x the length of a deck of playing cards, and about as wide and thick. The stylus slides into a slot, there is an IR and SD port on 1 side of the unit, and a headphone jack and CF slot on the top of the unit. The bottom of the unit has the DC power jack and 'Sharp IO port', which is where it mates with its cradle.
Hardware/OS
The Z 5500 runs on the Intel StrongArm processor, running a version of Lineo - embedded Linux. It has a 2.4.6 kernel. Because of this, any Linux software compiled for ARM (like the whole Debian arm tree) will run. You get 64MB of memory, 1/2 of which is locked away by the Z, so you have 32MB to run in. This has not proved to be a problem, yet. It runs Qtopia, an embedded GUI system on a 320x240 color screen. Almost any linux-y thing you can think of, you can do. It has a shell, you can even make swapfiles to increase running memory (at the expense of storage of course). There are init scripts. Repeat after me: It's a miniaturized Linux box. Everything runs as root. It uses ext2fs for main storage, and minix and cramfs for its own purposes. You can type 'mount' to see what's what.
Keyboard
The keyboard is excellent. You hold the Zaurus in both hands and type with your thumbs. Clever use of 'Shift' and 'Function' keys give you nearly QWERTY layout. You can get about 1 letter every 3/4 of a second.
Handwriting
It also does handwriting recognition, in a certain area of the screen. You enable this by hitting a small icon on the screen, and scribble away. I've not spent much time with it, yet. It's fiddly, but not as bad as Palm's Grafiti.
Backlight
Good, but not great. The screen is lit from a flourescent light on the side, which can look weird if you hold the Z at an angle. Some parts of the screen are brighter than others.
Sync
The Z connects to its host via IP over USB. Syncing occurs completely over IP. This is slick, if you get a CF Ethernet card for it, you can (in theory) sync with your system anywhere in the world. My old Palm had a serial cable, so USB seemed like warp speed to me. Save yourself headache - set the Zaurus to NOT use DHCP, likewise your PC system. It defaults to 192.168.129.201, your PC defaults to 192.168.129.1. There's a GUI to configure all of this on the Z.
GUI
Very cool. Touch once to run an app, touch and hold to bring up properties. A combination of thumb and thumbnail will get everything done.
I hooked it up and let it charge for a while, then loaded the software onto my PC. I have Windows2000 running on an ABit BP6 motherboard, with 2 USB 1.0 ports. This m
Did it as well... (Score:5, Informative)
For me, for $160 (+$80 for the wireless card) it's been $$$ well spent.
Not anymore (as of the 5600) (Score:2, Informative)
Cheers,
Jeremy
Re:Root? (Score:4, Informative)
There is an app for th Z that gives you a login screen, I have not tested it, so I do not know if it provides user-id with different privledges than root.
This is functionally a single user multi-tasking device. It happens to run a multi-user capable OS, however that does not require that that feature be used.
Does this create potential problems? Sure. However the system files can not be removed by the user, though certain configuration files can. Even so, if you really care, you can reset the platform to it's original (or last flash rom) state by completely draining the battery. Make regular backups to cf memory.
-Rusty
Nice tech review of the Zaurus (Score:4, Informative)
OpenZaurus (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Did it as well... (Score:3, Informative)
Some useful links (Score:5, Informative)
Some more useful links:
Zaurus DevNet forums [zaurus.com]
The Zaurus Notebook (tips and tricks) [zaurus.com]
Zaurus Loves Linux [loveslinux.com]
Now what I really want, is a portable device to connect the usb cable from the phone described in this article [slashdot.org] to the Zaurus dataport.
Re:Some useful links (Score:5, Informative)
I got one too (Score:5, Informative)
But then the HSN special came up, and DAMN I had to try it out.
It's a very cool device which is perfect for my needs but a little lacking as a general purpose PDA. However it has a LOT of potential.
Hint: don't bother with OpenZaurus unless you like to experiment. It breaks everything. Stick with the stock ROM if you want to use PIM functions. I had problems with Opera, Konqurer, TheKompany's apps, and pretty much anything that didn't come with OZ. Too bad, because the base components of OZ are much better than the stock ROM (for instance it actually shows how much battery you have left as %-age).
I set up wireless, set it up to do backups with rsync+SSH, and to NFS mount my MP3 directory. I have it running through my privoxy proxy, filtering out ads and cookies... Sweeeeeeeeet!
Hint: to set up your WCF12 card (if you have one of those), set up syslog to log somewhere, run syslog, and plug in your card. You'll see the necessary parameters to set up the card in the logs.
Another hint: DON'T EVER REBOOT FROM THE GUI
1) quit Qtopia
2) while it's counting down, hit '/'
3) hit 'a' at the menu to get a console login
4) log in
5) type "telinit 6"
Be sure to back up often anyway, since your stuff is stored in a ramdisk.
Anyway this is LOTS of fun for linux geeks, I haven't had this much fun since I installed OS X (UNIX COMMAND LINE.. ON A MAC??? AND NOW ON A PDA??? *spurt*). In fact I often think to myself.. whoa...what if APPLE made one of these bad boys with Mac OS X and apps that "just work"
Unfortunately it doesn't work with OS X / iSync but you can at least set up USB networking with this driver [lucid-cake.net]. Tell Apple you'd like them to support the zaurus, since many Zaurus geeks are probably also OS X geeks!
Anyway, these things are super-fun
OpenZaurus is the killer app (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I also bought an HSN special (Score:1, Informative)
Agree about the shift-letter thing
Hunt down the "tapboard" ipkg for an IBM-ATOMIK style onscreen keyboard that's organized so common letters are clustored together. Much faster once you are used to it.
Hunt down the embedded Konsole package with the wrap/ no wrap toggler, that's the best.
Also, buy a copy of tkcCard, which is a little mini-database that lets you make forms and fill them out with data. VERY handy and an app I use all the time, for shopping lists, todo lists, anything else that requires data collection.
Zaurus 5600 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Dear God (Score:5, Informative)
Please research before you post 3 year old "facts"
Re:A new version of Open Zaurus is out! (Score:3, Informative)
Just look at the new icons [handhelds.org] compared to the old ones [handhelds.org].
Check out the slick coloring- a cool translucent look for soothing, grey-on-grey symbols with gently blurred edges. They'll be especially good in bright conditions, when the LCD screens of a PDA will reflect back all the ambient light and remove all contrast.
Re:OpenZaurus (Score:4, Informative)
For one thing, it can have reliable TCP/IP. It may depend on the specific networking hardware (USB to Linux, or WinXP, or a CF ethernet or 802.11b card) you're trying to use, but the Sharp-supplied ROMs often simply give up on transmitting after 100kB or so (and then won't re-initialize until after a reboot).
Other kinds of hardware compatibilty and stability were also improved in OpenZaurus (although the recent release-candiates introduced several random bugs, hopefully the 3.2 release has fixed them)
The major design change with OpenZaurus is that the main filesystem is stored in Flash memory, rather than just RAM like on the original ROMs (or on a Palm). This means that if your system crashes (or loses power), files like your addressbook and network card settings are preserved.
(The normal Sharp ROMs only write to flash during the special "reflashing" process to upgrade the ROM, but OpenZaurus can modify it at any time. This could possibly create a risk of hardware failure, as flash memory has limited reusability)
a better jpg viewer that might allow me to see large pictures direct off my digital camera in full screen mode
The viewer can scale and rotate. However, it's decompression algorithm might not be efficient enough to unpack a full 1600x1200 JPG without exhausting your system RAM. (There are commerical viewers which can definately cope)
The problem I have with my zaurus is that is does not work with my wireless card.
OpenZaurus is known to work pretty well with this. Of course, the Sharp ROMs often handled it decently too (although they split the network configuration across several applets, making you go through more steps to set it up)
They're not sold out! (Score:2, Informative)
Alternatives to the SL-5500 (Score:2, Informative)
That's the first I've heard of OpenPDA. Anyone know if their claim is true that the Sharp Zaurus uses their software?
Re:Graffiti, and rant (Score:2, Informative)
There is no pause on the Zaurus as it converts text.
Wrong again. It's actually extremely easy to train it to new methods. Check the PDF manual available at the official site for more information.
I find the built in keyboard very usable. In fact, that's what I use the most. There are however external keyboards available including one that uses infrared(!)--no wires/cables.
Wrong yet again. The batteries cost $50 retail. They're available even cheaper if you do a bit of searching. And the Zaurus's batteries (it has more than one) are fully replaceable.
Try to write based on facts next time.