One Shot Design

A Zaurus is, like it or not, a geek device. Not “geek” in the sense that it will make you look like one, but “geek” in the feeling you will get trying to cope with it.

At least that’s how I felt in mid-October 2006, when I unpacked mine from its box delivered straight from Japan. The SL-6000, announced in 2003 and released subsequently, was a compete redesign of the 5500 and its successor, the 5600.

With the 6000, Sharp aimed to appeal to the corporate user, by offering its own flavor or embedded Linux with Opera, the most powerful web browser for devices. Despite the positive response from Open-Source enthusiasts, the product never reached the expected export sales. The Zaurus 6000 was then limited to the Japanese market until it was discontinued recently, to be superseded by clamshell models.

Being one of the last items delivered to Japanese retailers, mine was brand new and featured an operating system set for the Japanese alphabet. That’s what got my “geeking” started. I already knew about projects such as OpenZaurus, which aim at taking advantage of Linux embedded devices such as the Zaurus, to play around with the Operating System and port applications.

After purchasing an inexpensive flashcard adapter, I was able to flash the Zaurus memory and install OpenZaurus. As for destktop Linux, the operating system runs a desktop environment on top of Linux. Despite being more mature than GPE alternative, Opie does not yet take advantage of the in-built Wifi card. I shortly replaced the Opie desktop with the GPE, only to fail at connecting to a Wifi hub. So I flashed it back to Opie again, which would finally lead me to discover some of the powerful applications, start using them ad relying upon them.

• Photo viewer
  The first thing is that the Zaurus features both a CompactFlash and a SecureDigital slot, which, once I installed Opie-eye, an image viewing application, became a perfect complement to digital cameras. Using a 1Gb SD card, I am able to go around with my entire photo collection and view it on the VGA screen (640 x 480 pixels).
• Full-featured calendar manager
  KO/Pi is a trimmed-down version of KOrganizer, a desktop calendar application. The Zaurus port has much more features than Opie’s native calendar application. I can not only view calendar events and todo’s, but I can also create them and move them between the Zaurus and a desktop computer thanks to the ICS format filters.
• Critical data
  As an adept of piggy banking, I spread my finances over five bank accounts, which means a lot of account and PIN numbers to remember, plus the numerous logins for email accounts, FTP servers and Content Manager Softwares I have to keep track of. Using Zsafe, a Zaurus application ported to Linux, I created a password-protected file to have all my critical data at hand while protecting it from eyesdropping through advanced encryption.
• Reading
  Besides having filters enabling it to display and handle several ebook formats, Opiereader also handles HTML. I often save web articles on the CF card to read them while commuting.
• Writing
  I typed these lines on the go, at a relatively good speed, using the Zaurus tiny in-built keyboard and the TinyKate application. Writing in English is fine, because I never have to use accents, which both the keyboard and the on-screen keyboard lack.
• Data resilience
  The Zaurus has about 64 MB of internal memory, using a special type of flash card, which never erases in case it should remain without power for a very long time. Once embedded Linux is installed, there are about 10 MB left to install the applications. This doesn’t seem like a lot by desktop computers standards, but taking into consideration the average 100 Kb per application, it is more than sufficient. The very comprehensive Linux folder structure allows me to flash the internal memory over and over again, when in fact it only affects the original kernel and modules. All the personal data stored by application stay on, which means that all the applications when back to normal once I had them re-installed. Kopie, the contact manager and Zsafe were all able to access all data saved prior to the memory flashing. This is probably the one feature I’m most satisfied with.

These are but a fraction of the possibilities offered by the Zaurus. With GPE, there is the possibility of surfing the Web with an embedded browser, handling email accounts through a powerful mail client and to make FTP uploads and downloads.

There is the possibility of running PocketWorkstation, a trimmed-down version of the Debian Linux distribution, which turns the Zaurus into a powerful sub-notebook. I haven’t attempted yet because there are no detailed and structured information describing the procedure. To be able to do it requires a good knowledge of the Linux operating system, and I don’t look the part.

For the technically-enclined, there is an in-built USB port. Instead of choosing a standard mini-USB plug like Motorola, Sharp went for a more exotic one, which is not commonly found. I ordered an USB adapter for the Zaurus proprietary plug, which is used to connect it to the craddle. The Zaurus can thus be wired onto any type of network.

My rating? Three stars because of the OS’s which still need to be polished.