Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 Review
By. Brian Hursey Hardware: Device- Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 Storage-Sandisk 64mb SD card, Crucial 64mb CF card Networking- Linksys WCF-12 Wireless card. Software: OpenZaurus 3.5.3 / Opie 1.2.0 -> hentges.net Abstract: There are many ways to use a pda. In the past some have have used have been less flexible than others. When I talk about flexibility. I mean the ability to be able to edit and customize the device the way you want to have it and use it. This device is natively based on Linux. The designers of the device targeted it towards IT professionals and office workers to some extent. It has the basic PIM applications like calender, e-mail, to do list, text editor. In this report I will go over the goods and the bads of this device and its software. Software Overview: Sharp had discontinued the development of their software an open source project took over the development of the system rom base. The project is called openzaurus and they are using an interface named opie that is a fork of the original interface that was qpe. The software includes additional applications like gaim, irc client, ftpclient, and many others. Problems: A few of the problems that I have run across are mostly feed back, and software issues. One of the main problems that I have notice are email client and web browser problems. When you connect to a site and its loading there is no loading icons or status bars. So when you try to connect to the e-mail server, and the device is busy the user wants to know if the device is responding and of course the first instinct is to click. Of course when the user does this it make the device take longer to respond. Most of the software developed for this system was written and designed by programmers. The problem with this is that the interfaces are normally designed by programmer who may not be focusing on HCI design. However even with some of its design flaws. Like the lack of feedback to the user and it may to many options that can confuse the user. Flexibility: This system was designed and target towards the IT professional but it was also designed to be used by normal pda users. It has all the basic PIM applications. There is also the flexibility to use open source applications that are written with the qt api. You can turn you pda into a fully fledged computer if you want to. Doing that of course takes some Linux knowledge even though the system has a easy to use package manager that you can
download the newest applications form an online list. You can do this by either manually downloading the files and transferring them over by CF card. You also can automatically download them from the online list by using a usb connection to your main computer or using a cf network card. For me this flexibility was really what drew me to this pda. Because of the limits of budget and technology of my previous pda's. I could never get online or use any of the useful features that I could use at work. Because of the limits of hardware I could never expand the way I needed to. I was always limited in some way. Either it was software or hardware limitations. The Zaurus has a SD(secure digital) card expansion and an CF(compact flash) expansion slot. The flexibility of the software allows you to install the main file system on the sd card so it will free up room in your main ram. This allows more storage locally and more memory resources. You can use expansion cards or extra storage on the CF card. I have a linksys CF wireless card that allows me to connect to any wireless networks. The system has a network took that allows you to discover and add wireless access points to your system with ease. Affordances: The main affordances are that you get a cheep pda on todays market with the flexibility needed of IT professionals, but you have less interfaces making a less user friendlily environment. The one of the main navigational affordances is the toggle button. It is natural to uses this. The user is naturally drawn to this button. Also the ok and cancel buttons are natural affordances they are in a location that is instinktivly natural to press. Applications: I will go over the basic applications that one down side to installing an open source rom is that the office suit that is included in the default rom is not installed on the system by default. However you can easily download the package and install it again by providing your serial number as proof that you own the device, and they will allow you to download the package. I will however just go over the main applications I use in this paper and the positive and negatives of the software packages. I mostly use this device as a communication and organization device. I did not buy it to be used as a mobile office platform so I have yet to install the office package. Contact List: This application is designed to store all of your contacts and contact information. You can set categories and assign each contact a category. This application is very flexible and has a great deal of features. The user interface problems I found with this application was that the amount of options they gave you made it where you had multiple pages of options instead of one. This can be confusing for a normal user, but flexible for an advanced user. One interesting and useful feature of the contacts list is the ability to beam your contacts from a palm based hand held. You can beam you calender, contacts,

and to do list over. This feature was very easy and very useful to me because my last pda that I used was a palm m130. I was able to easily in a few seconds transfer all my data over to my new pda. Calender: The calender system is like any other system you can schedule appointments and either set a certain time or a recurrence of the appointment. It displays the appointments in different views one shows just the text or the day the other one's break down from year, to month, to week, and finally to day breakdowns. It is a very flexible calender system the only down side I have noticed is that the text over flows the box, and does not show all in the day breakdown mode. You can see this in the right figure. Other than that problem this calender system is easy to use and navigate. It is much like other calender system I have used in the past. Email Client: This software has basic e-mail support including pop3 and IMAP protocols. However it does not natively support ssl so services like pop3 forwarding with gmail will not work. I was able to get clayton's student mail and clayton states faculty e-mail to work with it. A few problems that I found with the e-mail system are no status bar for checking and downloading mail. This give the user no feedback and caused me several times to lock the pda up by getting impatience and taping the touch screen further causing more resources to be taken up on the system. Gaim: Gaim is a instant message client that supports many protocols. This application had one of the most user friendly interfaces that I have seen. It had status bars while logging in to provide feedback. It had the ability to switch between chat sessions with people. It was very flexible and easy to setup and use. Terminal: The system has a terminal emulation program that ties into the pda's system. The best thing about this is the ability to edit configuration files if the system becomes corrupt. You can also do remote administration. This becomes very useful if you are stuck away from your system and need to restart a service on your server. It allows you to be more flexible and not be limited to a static console. The negative aspect of this program is that it does not respond to ok on the pda as enter. This is annoying because the OK key is the enter key by default. So to get the enter key you need too select the software based keyboard and hit enter on it. One of the most useful features is the availability of some of the most useful commands in a drop down menu to save you the time of actually typing the command.

XMMS Embedded ( media player): Another application that I use a great deal is xmms it is a media player that is based off of xmms media player that is in Linux. It has all of the features in being able to play mp3's and ogg's. The only thing that I have seen is it not being able to play online streams unless they have the *.mp3 extension. The interface ties into the toggle control, up and down will turn the volume up and down, right and left will change tracks, and the center button is stop and start. You can hold down right or left to fast forward or rewind. I found it really easy to use when you turn the display back lite off and are in a car or in bed listening to music. Changing music is more natural than my last media player. mplayer: Mplayer is a command line application it will play mpeg2 video. I have found it best performance wise to convert the movie or video to 320x240 in resolution. The down side to this application is its command line based which means you have to initiate it from command line by issuing the command with the path to the video file. There are other media players that you can have that are gui based I have yet seen the need to install those yet. VNC Viewer: Another application that I uses is the vnc viewer. It allows you to create system profiles then connect to those systems and manipulate the use interface and run programs. One scenario for this usage is your an office work, and you are away from your system. You forgot to send your report to your boss, and you cant get to the office. You can vnc into your system at work and email your report to your boss by the deadline. This application gives you the flexibility to be able to connect to external pc's remotely and do need work or maintenance. Customization: You can customize the interface and bind how the the main buttons react to your input it has two different input. The first is just push. You also have an alternative selection by pushing and holding the button for a few seconds. This allows you to have twice the functionality of the four main buttons. You can in the launcher application you can set a background and font properties for all the tabs or you can set individual settings for each tab. This makes you be able to have a different background for every tab. This can make it easier for you to know what page you are on in just a glance.
Hardware: Some of the most attractive features of the Zaurus for me was the slide out keyboard, and the expansion options with a colorful screen. Even though the system is almost four years old it still competes with the newer pda. The down sides I have found is the battery. The battery that came with it is a 3.7v 950mAh. With constant usage of the pda at level two of brightness. The pda lasts for about three hours. However once you add the CF-12 wireless card the pda last one hour to an hour and a half of usage. This is not to bad for me because I only get about that amount of usage a day. However there are batteries that are made and sold by Zaurus SL-5500 users that are 3.7v 1800mAh. This extends the normal constant usage to around six to seven hours. The ability to expand my systems memory to the sd card is another very attractive feature. You can symbolic link your file system to the sd card. This will save you allot of space on the main system allowing that space to be used as a memory resource for the system. This is an advanced process, but there are custom roms that are released on the Internet. So the normal user can take advantage of this capability with out having to know command line or do any advanced setup. I am using one of those rom's that already has your file system mapped to the sd card. This gives me the possibility to have much more applications installed on the system. The device its self is easy to hold and use. The thumb-board is easy to use and type on. Typing a long document can get tiering, but from what I read after a while it becomes much easier. Each one of the main buttons has an easy to understand graphic that describes the application it will launch. Their is not icon for its secondary us though. To save room their is no built in speaker, but there is a headphone/mic combo plug. I personally would rather have a expansion option rather than a built in speaker. Normal user probably will not see it this way. Not having a speaker will be a negative in their evaluation of the product, but in the design of the system this is a positive because it saves space and power consumption. The device still however has a very basic beep speaker allowing for alarms and some audio feedback. The cpu is a Intel StrongARM-1110 rev9 (v4l) processor it runs a 206mhz. This is not equal to the newer 400mhz xscale processors, but because it runs a less system intensive operating system the performance seems good. The toggle button is another useful feature of the system it has a 360 degree range of motion and has a center button you can push down. This is very handy so you don't have to use the stylist to navigate. You can sync they system with Microsoft systems by either using the cradle, or using the wireless card with adhoc networking connecting with the desktop.

Conclusion: This device I would recommend for any it professional or geek. Although if a normal every day user comes up to me and asks me what pda do I suggest I would suggest for them to get a newer palm device. It all depends what you are going to do with the device. I consider a normal user as one who check e-mail, and normal organizational tasks. This is a superb device but the reason it did not catch on in the us was because it was designed for the tech industry. References and resources: Zaurus Users Group: http://www.zaurususergroup.org/ This is a great resource for all zaurus based pda's. It brings all users together in one place. It has a highly active form and how-to docs. OpenZuarus: http://www.openzaurus.org/ Since the device came out in 2001 and it is based on linux. The open source community has taken the device and made it so much more. Sharp stoped creating updates for the system so the community has continually updated the rom and added to it.

Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 June 29, 2002 Colug Presentation Dave Reed dreed@capital.edu

1 Specications

206 MHz Strong Arm processor, 64 MB memory, 16MB Flash ROM 240x320 resolution 65,536 color 3.5 Reective TFT Front-Lit Display CF and SD/MMC expansions slots stereo headphone/microphone jack slide out keyboard IR (can beam data between devices and Palm Pilot) cradle with USB plug rechargeable, replaceable lithium-ion battery AC adapter plugs into unit or cradle application and cursor buttons stylus & touch screen originally retailed for $499 and available in the $425-$450 range, but now retails for $399

System Software

embedded version of Linux 2.4.6-rmk1-np2-embedix http://www.lineo.com Qtopia for Embedix Plus PDA http://www.trolltech.com Insignia Jeode JVM http://www.insignia.com Opera Browser http://www.opera.com

Applications

calendar, address book, todo list, email Hancom Word (read/write MS Word), Sheet (read/write Excel), Presenter (PowerPoint viewer) Image Viewer (PNG, JPEG, possibly others) Media Player (MPEG, MP3, buy Ogg player separately) Voice Recorder calculator, clock/stop watch, etc. terminal (shell) available for free on web (and I think on CD) many others available for free download or minimal cost DrawPad, NeoCal, Today, VNC server, Tab Manager
Asteroids Go Mindbreaker (Mastermind) Mine Hunt Patience (Solitaire) Snake Word Game (Scrabble)

Java Demos

Personal Java - a standard dened by Sun - doesnt include all the features of regular Java two graphical applet demos come with the Zaurus 2D only, although one appears to be 3D (decompiled it to check) a friend of mine wanted to see if a Java rendering applet worked http://mrl.nyu.edu/perlin/car/Car.html it apparently is written in Java 1.0 to make it as portable as possible; the idea was for the students to be able to modify the renderer Personal Java verier complained, but it works cd ~/java evm -appletviewer car.html

Settings

Backup/Restore (tar) Network & Sync Light & Power Others

Sync Software

sync done using ftp (Zaurus uses port 4242 for ftp) sync with Outlook (havent tried it) CD contains Windows version of Qtopia Desktop Linux and Windows version of Qtopia Desktop available from http://www.trolltech.com/developer/download/qtopia.html no Mac support available yet, although it is in development; issue appears to be Ethernet over USB drivers for Mac since the sync is done using ftp address book, todo list, calendar are currently XML les (plan to switch to a common database in future versions) found on desktop in: ~/.palmtopcenter/ and on Zaurus in: /home/root/Applications

Syncing with Linux

easy way - get a CF network card, give it a IP address on your network (may need to be a 192.168 address) cheaper way - use experimental Ethernet over USB on your desktop apparent stability issues with this driver - reports of lockups if stay telneted in to the Zaurus for long periods of time HOWTO at: http://www.ruault.com/Zaurus/ethernet-over-usb-howto.html get patch apply patch (doesnt apply cleanly, can use fuzz or edit by hand) I hand applied it to a Red Hat 2.4.17-0.6 kernel from RawHide on a Red Hat 7.2 system make xconfig load config file from RedHat and modify: Code Maturity - development/experimental USB support: USB Network Adapters, module: USBD Network (Encapsulated) Host-to Host Link No for: CONFIG_USB_CDCETHER save config file make make make make dep clean bzImage modules

make modules_install cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.17-0.6-zaurus edit grub.conf file reboot to allow internet access for Zaurus, setup NAT on desktop (where 192.168.1.5 is desktop IP) iptables -t nat -F iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -j SNAT -o eth0 \ --to 192.168.1.5 echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward on Zaurus route add -host 192.168.129.200 usbd0 route delete -net 192.169.129.0/24 usbd0 route add default gw 192.168.129.200 edit /etc/resolv.conf on Zaurus and specify your nameserver

Remote Access

telnet built-in, just need to turn on the server; initially root has no password; I set one and there are claims that it causes sync problems but I havent found any openssh available VNC NFS - the following /etc/exports on desktop/laptop allows rw access to /home on my desktop/laptop with my desktop username as le owner /home 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0(rw,all_squash, anonuid=500,anongid=500)

Cross Compiler

HOWTO at: http://www.zauruszone.com/howtos/linux compiler setup howto.shtml binutils-cross-arm-2.11.2-0.i386.rpm gcc-cross-sa1100-2.95.2-0.i386.rpm glibc-arm-2.2.2-0.i386.rpm linux-headers-arm-sa1100-2.4.6-3.i386.rpm qtopia-free-1.5.0-1.i386.rpm environment variables setenv QTDIR /opt/Qtopia setenv TMAKEPATH /opt/Qtopia/tmake/lib/linux-g++ /bin/x86.sh
#!/bin/csh setenv CROSSCOMPILE /opt/Embedix/tools setenv QPEDIR /opt/Qtopia setenv QTDIR /opt/Qtopia set path = ($QTDIR/bin $QPEDIR/bin $path /opt/Embedix/tools/bin) setenv TMAKEPATH /opt/Qtopia/tmake/lib/qws/linux-x86-g++ setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH $QTDIR/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH echo "Altered environment for xx86 development" /bin/arm.sh #!/bin/csh setenv CROSSCOMPILE /opt/Embedix/tools setenv QPEDIR /opt/Qtopia/sharp setenv QTDIR /opt/Qtopia/sharp setenv PATH $QTDIR/bin:$QPEDIR/bin:$CROSSCOMPILE/bin:$QPEDIR/bin:$PATH setenv TMAKEPATH /opt/Qtopia/tmake/lib/qws/linux-sharp-g++/ setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH $QTDIR/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH echo "Altered environment for ARM Development"

example

cp /opt/Qtopia/example/*. source ~/bin/x86.sh tmake example.pro > Makefile make /opt/Qtopia/bin/qvfb &./example -qws make clean source ~/bin/arm.sh tmake example.pro > Makefile make (run on Zaurus via NFS)

Python

Python and PyQt packages for Zaurus available at: http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/ Python split into a number of separate packages so you can only install the modules you need again, development on desktop and running on Zaurus via VNC and NFS makes for fast development attendance program program icons are 28x32 PNG les tab icons are 13x13 PNG les tab manager program allows you to set icons, add tabs, and move programs between tabs

the packaging system is basically a compressed tar le and I believe I read it was compatible with Debians packaging system HOWTO http://www.zauruszone.com/howtos/ipkg howto.shtml attendance 1.0.0 arm.ipk # tar ztf attendance_1.0.0_arm.ipk./debian-binary./data.tar.gz./control.tar.gz # tar ztf data.tar.gz././opt/./opt/QtPalmtop/./opt/QtPalmtop/bin/./opt/QtPalmtop/bin/AttData.py./opt/QtPalmtop/bin/AttendApp.py./opt/QtPalmtop/bin/QtUtil.py./opt/QtPalmtop/bin/attend.py./opt/QtPalmtop/bin/check-attend.py./opt/QtPalmtop/apps/./opt/QtPalmtop/apps/Applications/./opt/QtPalmtop/apps/Applications/Attendance.desktop./opt/QtPalmtop/pics/./opt/QtPalmtop/pics/Attendance.png./IPKG_BUILD.6217/./IPKG_BUILD.6217/data.tar.gz
# tar ztf control.tar.gz././control # cat control Package: attendance Priority: optional Version: 1.0.0 Architecture: arm Section: qpe/applications Maintainer: Dave Reed Depends: python, PyQt Description: Attendance program # cat debian binary 2.0 script to build ipkg: http://www.zauruszone.com/howtos/downloads/ipkg-build in a build directory create a directory CONTROL containing the control le; in the build directory create the opt directory and all the contents of the opt directory listed in the above data.tar.gz le, execute: ipkg. and it will create the attendance_1.0.0_arm.ipk le

Annoyances

everything is done as root sync software occasionally is aky - appeared to have lost my address book once; recovered by copying xml le from my CDRW backup deleting a repeating calendar event sometimes deletes another repeatable event (read that it only happens if theres no Notes for the event) Documents le structure and use of.desktop les any.txt,.png le on SD/CF card shows up in Documents tab (annoying if you install an application on the card instead of memory); solution: use Unix hidden les (any le or entire directory that starts with a period is ignored)

Conclusion

applications are not as full-featured as Palm Pilot applications that have been around longer (many people complain that calendar is missing features: remind days in advance of events like birthday, all events must have a time - cant just have a date, etc.) reviews indicate its not as polished as Palm Pilot, but its denitely usable by the Unix illiterate as a PDA, but probably not worth the cost for them however, if you know Linux and like to tinker and write your own software, youll want one since its Linux based, there are lots of developers writing software so better applications will likely come along; from what I understand Trolltech is going to make updates freely available ROM is ashable and people are developing their own ROMs and software applications

Resources

TrollTechs Qtopia les http://www.trolltech.com/developer/download/qtopia.html Sharp site with software, tips, news, etc. http://www.myzaurus.com Ethernet over USB HowTo http://www.ruault.com/Zaurus/ethernet-over-usb-howto.html SourceForge site with mailing lists and software for download http://zaurus.sourceforge.net/ HOWTOs incluing cross compiler http://www.zauruszone.com/howtos software links (comprehensive, but slow - hosted over someones DSL line) http://www.killez.de/zaurus/ Python and PyQT http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/ software links http://www.zaurusoft.com/ ipkg HOWTO http://www.zauruszone.com/howtos/ipkg howto.shtml Open Zaurus http://sourceforge.net/projects/openzaurus