Sharp SL 5500 Zaurus PDA Review

I've been trying to use the Zaurus for about a week. The product was contradictory. The good ones: 1) This is without a doubt the ideal programmer's PDA. 2) You can program, compile and run on Zaurus (hard to believe but true). 3) There is some good free software including Neocalc which is a great calculator. 4) Revain.com had an excellent deal. 5) Contrary to some reviews I've seen, the screen looks very nice. Not so good: 1) PC sync software (Win2K in this case) stinks. It crashes, freezes…

The most notable attribute to mention is the sheer power of this device. Unlike the Pocket PC operating system (OS), this little Zaurus runs an embedded Linux OS distribution. Do I have to say more? The possibilities are endless. Sharp has an excellent website for distributing and supporting applications. It's on mysaurus.com. Get apps, updates and documents here. You can download a console to run terminal commands. There were a few oddities I encountered while downloading app packs. An…

First of all, if you're just looking for PIM (Personal Information Management) features and aren't inclined towards Linux in general, then do it yourself. Do yourself a favor and buy a Palm Pilot. Zaurus is basically a mini Linux workstation with many features you would normally only find on a desktop. With Zaurus you can: * surf the Internet with a scalable and full-featured browser * read and edit MS Office documents (Word, Excel and Powepoint) * write and run scripts and programs (including…