Zaurus SL-C3000 review praises versatility, usability

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Jan. 24, 2005

BargainPDA has reviewed an Anglicized version of Sharp's latest Japan-only Zaurus model, which boasts a 4GB hard disk drive. The review praises the SL-C3000's build quality and instant-on operation, while ruing the lack of built-in Wi-Fi and incomplete Japanese-to-English translation (for example, of user help files).

In a shameless ploy for geek appeal, BargainPDA reviewer Ian Giblin has thoughtfully included a text dump of all the files residing in the Zaurus's /proc filesystem, just in case you were wondering what memory addresses were used for the frame buffer console, for example.

The review also includes the output of df -H and other command-line system profile tools, as well as a nice table comparing the hardware specifications of several recent Zaurus models, including the SL-6000, Sharp's recently discontinued US model.

Giblin also talks about installing Cacko, a firmware distribution for Zauruses based on X11, as a replacement for the Zaurus's native firmware, which is based on the recently GPL'd Qtopia PDA framework and application stack. While hundreds of applications have been written for Qtopia, obviously there are thousands and thousands of X applications that, with little effort, can be made to work adequately on the Zaurus's 410MHz Intel XScale PXA270 processor and color VGA (640 x 480) display.

Giblin concludes that the SL-C3000 is best suited for users running more than PIM (personal information management) applications. Given the device's price of over $800 (from localization specialist Dynamism), and the availability of much less expensive Linux PDAs from Empower and others, that seems logical.

The complete text of Giblin's review is here. An earlier, somewhat less detailed SL-C3000 review from Giblin is described here.

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