Review of the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500

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."

Re:OpenZaurus

[Zeinfeld]

If you have a CompactFlash card, then making the switch is very easy and if you don't like it, it's also trivial to switch back to Sharp's ROM. So my suggestion is to try it out early before you get too comfortable and spend a lot of time setting up the PDA just the way you like it.

Err perhaps someone could explain to me what is better about openZaurus, I mean apart from knowing that nobody made any money out of writing the code why am i meant to think this a good thing?

Does it have a better version of mastermind? a better jpg viewer that might allow me to see large pictures direct off my digital camera in full screen mode (can't rotate is a lame excuse, like what stops the thing just swapping X and Y coordinates on display).

The problem I have with my zaurus is that is does not work with my wireless card. Damn thing simply won't recognise my home network.

Anyone ported PocketPC to Zaurus?

How about Microsoft Bob?

I owned one for three months

[prostoalex]

I used to own a Sharp Zaurus, but then sold mine used and got a Dell Axim. Here're some impressions:

What's wrong with Sharp Zaurus [epinions.com] - mainly battery life, applications crashing when dealing with lartge documents, inconvenient thumb keyboard.

What's good and bad about Dell Axim [epinions.com] - mainly problems with battery reporting, problems with ActiveSync and infamous battery reporting bug.

Re:Root?

[Minna Kirai]

It is a very bad idea, because those devices are advertised [sharpmobile.com] as using frequent, wireless network access.

This is especially bad because the default root password is "". And changing the root password breaks the default sync software!

If you bring a Zaurus running the OEM software into a location offering 802.11b wireless, you can easily be rooted by any script kiddy who recognizes your PDA.

Zauruses are so obscure that this risk is low, today, but it's still a major design problem. Hopefully, the 5600 version has fixed this. The software patch for the prior model was inadequate.

OpenZaurus 3.2 is out

[Technomancer]

I just got Zaurus from HSN couple days ago.
Played for one day with factory ROM, experienced lots of freezes with WIFI cards.

Then I flashed OpenZaurus 3.1rc3.1, and now 3.2.
All the hangs are gone, most programs are much better, internal flash is writable. I added 256MB SD-MMC card and moved part of the system to /mnt/card and it works great. opie-mediaplayer2 is based on Xine and plays DIVX files nicely. OZ has SSH installed by default, nicer UI, separate power/backlight settings for AC and battery mode, hostap driver for WIFI. The only problem is it is stuck on 2.4.6 kernel because of binary only SD-MMC driver.