Saturday, June 29
ZDNet: Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 User Ratings Sharp sold the SL-5000 series at the JavaOne Conference recently, and the line for them went out the door and across the street for 2 days. A Wi-Fi compliant network CF card was included with the bundle, and I can now browse the internet from my living room on this little PDA (I have a Netgear wireless router in my house). With support for both SD/MMC and CompactFlash cards, and support for Java, I think this thing is going to be huge. I am and have been a palm user for 2 years now and was just about to buy a new 515 model, but since I can just write programs in Java now, upload them to the Zaurus and then run them, I'm thinking I might put off buying a Palm - at least until Palm ups it's screen resolution and solidifies its programming model, which is somewhat scattered now. As for a Zaurus vs a Pocket PC - what can I say? Open source vs propriatary lock in, plus the keyboard which is easy to use after playing with it for about an hour, and the stability and support for Linux that's hitting it's stride now.... Pocket PC suddenly finds itself beaten hands down. Mark my words - all the Java developers that bought this thing at the conference - they weren't just buying it for it's pretty looks. There's going to be some very nice apps and support for this thing sooner than you'd think.
