Sharp Zaurus SL-5600 Personal Mobile Tool

The Sharp Zaurus SL-5600 Personal Mobile Tool is the most recent release
in the 5000 series. As the owner of a Zaurus SL-5500, I was
pleased to see the many hardware and software improvements Sharp has
made in the 5600. The Zaurus SL-5600 retails for $499.00.
Hardware
The screen on the 5600 is bright and clear, somewhat brighter than the
5500 screen. Colors are vibrant and true. The screen is readable both indoors and
outdoors, in darkness and bright sunlight. The front light can be turned
off and on by a hardware button to save power.

The keyboard slides out and is comfortable for thumb-typing. An FN key serves
the same purpose as the Ctrl key in most
situations. Other special characters are available on the on-screen
keyboard, which is accessible by tapping on the bottom taskbar.

The internal speaker and microphone are adequate but not spectacular. They
are nice to have but produce only fair quality sound. The audio quality
of the speaker is about the same quality as most internal PC
speakers. The microphone works satisfactorily if you are speaking into
it at close range.
Hardware Specs
Processor: 400MHz Intel Xscale (PXA-250)

Memory: 64MB protected Flash, 32MB SDRAM

Display: 3.5" reflective TFT with front light; 320 x 240 resolution;
65,536 colors; touch sensitive input

Keyboard: 37-key QWERTY keyboard

Expansion: 1 Type II CF card slot; 1 SD/MMC card slot

Battery: Rechargeable, replaceable; 1700 mAH x 3.7 V Li-ion

Weight: 7.1 oz/203 g
Setup
Setting up the Zaurus 5600 is simple and straight-forward. A series of
wizards guides you through the system setup.

In addition to the slide-out keyboard, an on-screen pickboard,
Unicode support and handwriting support are included. An icon on the
bottom taskbar lets you switch between the input options. Another input option
is an external keyboard, such as the Pocketop IR keyboard.

Network setup is easy with the network applet. You can set it up manually
or use the wizard to guide you. A borrowed Socket Low-Power Wireless CF
card worked right out of the box.

The IR port makes it easy to beam your contacts to another handheld and
to your Zaurus from your cell phone. It also allows communication with
an IR keyboard and other IR peripherals.
Differences between the 5500 and 5600
Battery: The 5600 comes with a 1700mAH battery, as opposed to the 950mAH battery
standard on the 5500. This greatly improves the battery life. The battery
on the 5600 sticks out a little on the back of the unit, but this doesn't
feel uncomfortable when holding the Zaurus.
Table 1. Battery Life Comparison ChartTask55005600 Play OGG with backlight off4.75 hrs8.5 hrs Play OGG with light on2 hrs.4.6 hrs. With Socket wireless card1 hr.3 hrs. 
Documents Tab: On the 5500, the documents tab shows icons for all documents, graphic
files, music files and so on. The display is unorganized, and it is extremely
difficult to navigate through all of the icons to find specific files. The
5600 has icons for each media type--RAM, CF and SD cards. Tapping
on the icons shows the files sorted into their respective directories
or folders. This is a huge improvement.

Figure 2. Documents Tab

Appearance: In terms of appearance, the 5500 has only three styles and eight color schemes. Background/wallpaper
addition requires a third-party commercial application such as Zstyle,
which allows additional theme and background installation. The 5600, on
the other hand, has seven styles, eleven color schemes and adds the ability
to display a custom wallpaper, all without the need for a third-party application.

Figure 3. View of Desktop Using ZBlue Theme and Aurora Wallpaper

Tab Settings: The 5500 has no applet for changing tab settings. A third-party application,
Tab Manager, is available that allows the user to change tab settings.
The 5600 has a built-in applet, Tab Settings, that allows a user to
add/remove tabs, except the default tabs. It also allows the user to
change the order of tabs and easily move applications between tabs.

Opera Web Browser: The 5500 comes with Opera 5.0. The 5600 comes with Opera 6.0, which
offers many improvements over version 5.0.

Opera 6 is a full-featured web browser. It offers several scaling options
for viewing Web pages on the small Zaurus screen. It also allows multiple
open windows. One nice feature is the Toggle small screen layout option. This
attempts to format the Web page to a small screen size, which helps by
eliminating horizontal scrolling . This sometimes produces strange-looking
results, but I really like the feature. Surfing the Internet on a small
screen can be painful, especially with all the sites that use frames. This
version of Opera also allows saving Web pages for local browsing.

Figure 4. Opera Web Browser in Small Screen Layout View

Data Safety: On the 5500, a hard reset or total battery depletion causes
total data loss, returning the Zaurus to its factory state. The 5600 stores
user data on protective flash storage, so a hard reset or total battery
depletion doesn't cause data loss.

User accounts: The 5500 used the root account as the default user account, which
presented security issues. The 5600 uses Zaurus as the default user
account. Applications may be executed as root by tapping and holding on their
desktop icon and checking the execute as root option. Root access is
available in terminal.

Screen Cover: The 5500 has a frosted, hard plastic flip-up screen cover. The 5600 has a
clear, hard plastic flip-up screen cover. This allows usage of the Zaurus
(except for the touch screen) with the cover down, which proves to be handy
in some situations.

Connecting to Linux Desktop: Currently no Linux sync software is available for
the 5600. Qtopia desktop 1.6.1 (the most current version) does not work
with the 5600.

USB: I was unable to get USB connectivity working for the 5500 or the
5600 on Red Hat 8.0 in time for this article.

To connect wirelessly to the Zaurus from a PC, use an OpenSSH package for the Zaurus. Once installed, users can
connect through SSH in a terminal or graphically with GFTP (using SSH2). This
is the method I use for the bulk of my file transfers.

To connect the Zaurus to a Windows desktop over USB, I installed a driver from
the included CD. I also installed Qtopia Desktop and something new to
the 5600 called the Zaurus File Installer.
Software
The 5600 comes with the usual PDA-type applications. There's an address
book, calendar, to-do list, media player, e-mail application, Web
browser, text editor, word processor and spreadsheet. They are nice,
basic easy-to-use applications. For those who require more features,
third-party replacements are available.

The included software is as follows:

• Address Book
• Calendar
• To-Do List
• Email
• Text Editor
• Opera Browser
• System Info
• Media Player
• Calculator
• City Time
• Clock
• Help
• Voice Recorder
• Hancom MobileWord
• Hancom MobileSheet
• ImagePad

Games that come with the 5600 include:

• Asteroids
• Go
• MindBreaker
• Mine Hunt
• Patience
• Snake
• Word Game

Software on CD includes:

• File Manager
• Terminal
• Camera application (optional
  peripheral)
• Hancom Mobile Presenter

Installing Software
Installing software with the Install/Remove Software application
is a simple and straightforward process. Applications can be installed to
the internal RAM, SD or CF cards. When installing to cards, however,
a warning message pops up saying, "Some applications may run only on
Internal Flash. Are you sure you want to install?". I chose yes in each
case, and the applications installed to the SD card with no problems.

I own several commercial applications, and I installed and tested all
of them on the 5600, as described below. The few that didn't initially work properly were
fixed quickly by the developers.

tkc Applications: theKompany currently offers 26
fine applications for the Zaurus. tkcPlayer supports both OGG and MP3
audio formats; the company also offer a free ripper, tkcOggRipper.
TkcVideo supports MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, MSMPEG4 V3, H263(+) (RealVideo
1.0), Raw video, AVI and MJPEG.

The Kompany applications I tested were: tkcAddress, tkcCalendar, tkcCard,
tkcEditor, tkcExpense, tkcExplorer, tkcFTP, tkcGallery, tkcMahjongg,
tkcMail, tkcMemo, tkcPainter, tkcPlayer, tkcRadio, tkcRace, tkcRekall,
tkcRotator, tkcShopper, tkcSky, tkcToDo, tkcVideo and tkcWhiteboard.

Outliner:
an application that makes creating and editing
outlines a breeze. Outlines are saved as standard text files.

Stage One:
Stage One is hierarchal list manager that supports
checkboxes for each list item. I find it simple to
use and handy when I have tasks with sub-categories.

Interstellar Flames:
Spaceship shooting game with beautiful graphics and nice sound,
which I actually can hear on the 5600 due to its internal
speaker.

Jack the Uni-Psychle:
a fun scrolling game.

But what makes the Zaurus really special?

The Zaurus is not like any other PDA on the market. What really
differentiates it from other PDAs is what's inside: Linux. This OS
choice allows development on many different platforms. Libraries are
available for Python, PyQt and Java. There also is version of Xfree86
for the Zaurus. There's even a small Debian distribution that runs on a CF
card; I haven't tried it yet, but I hope to soon. And just try listening
to your MP3 files over wireless on a Palm! With the Zaurus and Samba or
NFS, this is a breeze. The Zaurus also has an Apache Web server with
PHP support, a tiny Boa Web server and even a Java Web server.

MySQL is a popular package, and tkcRekall is a full-featured
database front-end that can connect to MySQL and PostgreSQL databases
over a network. It also supports the creation of local dbx databases.

A VNC server and client are available as well. The VNC server is one of the must-have
applications. With VNC, you can control the Zaurus remotely, which is
handy for typing documents, adding contacts and so on, using the keyboard on
the PC.

There's also a nice file-synchronizing application called Unison that
allows multi-platform file synching. I use Unison to back up data and
also to keep my tkcRekall databases synchronized to my desktop. The
Zaurus package of Unison is available from the
Zaurus Software
Index.
Third-Party Hardware
The Pocketop keyboardis a compact IR
keyboard that folds in half and isn't much bigger than the Zaurus when
closed. An excellent driver for the 5500 was written by Craig Graham.
It was updated to reflect some changes to the 5600. The 5600 version is
available at
www.currybrothers.com/zaurus.

Figure 5.

The keyboard is nice looking and comfortable to type on, even though its
on the small side. Once I got used to the smaller size and keyboard
layout, I was able to type at a rapid pace. The Pocketop is great for
making notes at meetings, in a hotel room, on an airplane or even commuting
on the train.
Zthin Cables by SerialIO
I tested two cables from
SerialIO. One was an RS-232
serial cable and the other was a USB cable. The serial cable comes either
as either a db9 male or a db9 female. I chose the male so I could use it
to console into Cisco routers. It is converted to female with a gender
changer.

This cable is perfect for use with the 5500/5600, because it allows
users to slide open the keyboard, something the Sharp serial cable does
not allow. With this cable, I was able to use Minicom on the Zaurus to console
in to Cisco equipment. The 5600 is a perfect tool to use for quick
configurations and troubleshooting.

After attaching the appropriate connecters, I was able to connect
serially to my PC. On the 5500, I was able to establish a connection
and sync with Qtopia Desktop on both Windows and Linux.
On the 5600, I could sync serially with Windows.

If a Linux version of Qtopia Desktop for the 5600 was available,
this cable would be a perfect alternative for those who have Linux
USB issues. Hopefully, a version of Qtopia desktop for the 5600 will be
available for Linux in the near future.

The Zthin USB cable provides USB connectivity between the Zaurus and a PC,
as well as charging power, without having to use the Zaurus cradle. This
makes it an excellent choice for travelers with limited space.
Conclusion
The 5600 takes all the wonderful aspects of the 5500 a step further. The
software enhancements answer many of the requests made by 5500 users
over the course of the last year. The extended battery makes a huge
difference in day-to-day use. The built-in keyboard is indispensable,
and I'll never purchase another handheld unless it has one.

The Zaurus offers so much more flexibility than any Palm or PPC
handheld. The possibilities for custom applications for business
are endless. Currently, there are over 800 applications listed in the
Zaurus Software Index, both commercial and open source.
To top it all off, the Zaurus community is
phenomenal. The Zaurus DevNet Forums are active and offer help
and advice on almost every Zaurus topic.

For those who want to install and go, there are easy-to-install packages
for a wide range of applications. For those who want to push the limits, it is possible to create a
customized ROM image, develop new applications, port existing Linux
applications, use the many available tools to remotely administer a
network and connect to a company database wirelessly. The Zaurus 5600 is
more than a PDA, it's a tiny Linux computer.

Margot Ross is a Cisco-certified network professional who has been
using Linux for about a year, finally making the switch after her Windows PC
contracted two deadly viruses in three days. She lives in Connecticut with
her husband and two sons.