Rating: 
Summary: Excellent PDA and also a micro laptop
Review: This device is about on par PDA-wise with my former Palm IIIxe but it is very powerful as a general-purpose computer as well. I use it (in addition as a PDA) to write small programs (Java, Perl, C++ pending), read and write documents (I have taken meeting minutes with it multiple times), and play games. I right now consider it an extension of the brain in taking care of mundane tasks (scheduling, tasks, contacts) and as a portable computer without the bulk and battery issues. We are inseparable :).
Rating: 
Summary: A great PDA implementation
Review: This is a pretty nice PDA with notebook like features. With it, I have been able to store lots of useful information and add tons of powerful software. The best part is that it support JAVA and is opensource so there is a TON of software for it. I recommend this unit for anyone who wants to work and play on the road.
Rating: 
Summary: Great idea but a poor implementation.
Review: Sorry Sharp, but I tried. This Zaurus SL-5500 PDA is a great idea, but it is poorly implemented and supported. The screen is great; I love the fact that is uses Linux; and the applications included with the product are just fine. **BUT** I have grown tired of the constant synching problems between my workstation and the docking station. I've tried for days to get this ...thing to work, and I'm giving up. I have read many of the postings on message boards, and I believe my frustrations are shared by many. I can't recommend this product to anyone unless they are interested in pain. Sorry, I tried. Buyer beware!!!!!
Rating: 
Summary: excellent hardware, questionable software
Review: The Zaurus features fantastic hardware with a built in thumbboard that's surprisingly responsive, compact flash and SD slots, an excellent screen, fast processor, etc etc. I have no complaints about the hardware, topnotch stuff. The software is an entirely different story. It ranges from quite good to abysmal. The "OS" itself is nice and intuitive, modelled quite straight from standard KDE (if you're not familiar with KDE, it's very Windows like). And although things like a "start menu" don't translate well to the tiny size, the OS is still quite navagable and usable. The Opera web browser is great, the Jeode java virtual machine produces no complaints, media player is great, the to do list, contacts, etc are just fine. But the calendar application is awful. It's very buggy. Trying to change an appointment from within the PDA often leads to disaster, with the calendar app left in an unstable state (hard to explain). Attempting to fix the situation usually just leads to appointments being deleted. I've been reduced to only adjusting appointments from my desktop and resyncing, which removes a significant reason for having a PDA in the first place. Just horrible, and the biggest strike against the machine as I feel the calendar app is the most important of the bunch. The desktop syncing software is also unfortunately pretty raw. The version that ships with the Zaurus is pretty crippled and old. Newer versions lead to more features (such as the ability to install software), but they have their own unique bugs (such as sometimes the syncing process ignoring your overriding preferences and doing what it wants at times). If you're looking for a neat gadget to have some fun with or experiment with, look no further. Unix in your pocket is pretty cool. If you want a solid PDA you can depend on, keep looking. Or at least wait, I suspect a revision or two of the core ROM should change things dramatically. After all, rather small bugs are holding the show back, easily squashed.
Rating:
Summary: Coolness
Review: Ok, this PDA is awsome!! I got the Zaurus for Christmas this year, and this thing is so cool and easy(My mom could even figure out how to check her e-mail without too much help). I couldn't get it to sync with my computer through USB, so I used my wireless LAN card to sync, which was easy enough, and if it means less cords, I'm all for it! With the wireless LAN, all I did was put it in there and it reconized the link on my dad's access point! No software required! All around, this is a great PDA!!!
Rating:
Summary: Good toy, but has ways to go to become useful
Review: I was not really looking actively for a PDA, but when a good one showed up for a reasonable price on this site, I decided to go with Sharp Zaurus. Before that I have read quite a few positive reviews, and decided that Zaurus seemed to be a good choice. While it seemed that Zaurus was a nice little gadget, it's usability as a tool has not met expectations. I travel, I write, I program Java and Perl occasionally, I read email and browse, read books, listen to the music, and that's what I expected to do with this PDA. Battery life. Battery life was perhaps the biggest disappointment. Three hours is ok to get you through the day just checking up phone numbers and going back into the hybernate mode, but when I am up for reading a good book on the road trip, the battery life is quite disappointing, especially since newer models from Dell and Compaq boast 7-8 hours for the same kind of color screen. Keyboard. While Zaurus features quite an innovative design with built-in keyboard, if your plan is to type a journal entry, extensive email, or a 2-page paper, this PDA won't be of much use. I am a male, which besides some strong points brings in such indispensable attribute as large hands with large fingers, meaning that Zaurus experience was quite a nuisance for me. To be fair, that's probably true for all PDAs, not just this one specifically. But next time I will shop for one that has an external keyboard, Zaurus built-in one was good enough maybe to type two lines of text, not more. Applications. There's a wealth of applications for Zaurus out there and I did not feel that I was missing anything important. I discovered that I could not play WMV videos, but that's proprietary Windows format, so it's expectable. Zaurus did a good job playing MPEGs and MP3s, which is what most of my collection is anyway. Large documents. You would imagine that a PDA with 200 MHz, 64MB of RAM and about 512 MB total of added Flash card memory would cope with a text file of size 1-2 MB. After all, if you download a book off the Internet, that's the size that is quite common, especially if it's a PDF file with illustrations or some weird page formatting. My old laptop has a Pentium 90Mhz with 16 MB of RAM (don't laugh) and I had no problem dealing with large (larger than 1 MB) Word documents, PDF files or plain TXT documents. On Zaurus this experience proved to be quite painful. The documents sometimes would take 20 minutes (I am not kidding) to load and even then I would get an error about insufficient memory. Small documents under 50K load quickly, but then you can read them in couple of minutes anyway. I sold my Zaurus and am on the market for a new PDA. I am OS-agnostic, thus I don't care whether it's Palm, Windows or Linux based device. Now that I have had experience with a pocket computer, I know what to look for.
Rating:
Summary: Poor Underdog
Review: Had it in my hands for a few days, I'm happy it isnt mine.
Its poorly implemented, the software is pathetic and the screen looks cheap. Not to mention the fact that it is an underdog in a market with thousands of professional-looking titles available for the palm or the pocket pc.
If you are gonna spend money on a PDA, you'd better consider a Palm (Sony's are cool if you can afford them) or the new Pocket PCs.
Rating:
Summary: The best kept secret in PDAs
Review: Sharp Zaurus SL-5500
***** The sharp zaurus really is the best kept secret among PDAs. I've had my Zaurus for almost 9 months, and have had no problems with it. It's simply the best... And here's why: Operating System: Running on the Linux kernel, with embedex (Lineo) and sporting the QTopia desktop interface (which can be replaced by other Gnome and Opie interface), the Zaurus is a powerful mobile tool. While the Pocket PC interface (2000 and 2002) are decent, the QTopia interface out-does the Pocket PC by a long shot. The Pocket PC's interface has a more clunky feel, while the QT GUI makes use of the Zaurus' high-rez screen. Did I mention Java? It's got a built in "Jeode" JVM for Java developers. If you don't wanna take a crash course in C++, you can write programs for the Zaurus in Java. It's open source, just like it's desktop counterpart, so if you know what you're doing, you can easilly modify it to your taste. Pocket PC just can't match this kind of open source power. It's also incredibly stable. I can count the number of times it's crashed on my hand (and when it did crash it was with unstable 3rd party apps). IMHO, this is what the Pocket PC should've been. It's got the same task-bar/desktop look that the windows desktop OS has. Software: I'm not trying to turn this into a Pocket PC bash-athon, it just seems to be turning out that way. As an HTML and web programming enthusiast, the Opera browser has Pocket IE beat 10 to 1. While Microsoft boasts "Pocket IE supports WAP, XHTML and most JavaScript", Opera supports all of these and then some. And it supports ALL JScript objects (Prompt boxes, alerts, arrays etc...). And Opera promises to have applet and Flash plug-ins in the near future. In short, as pdageek.com put it, "The Zaurus version [of Opera] is just like the full version: Fast, small, and to the point". The other apps are great too. Hancom Word, Sheet and Presenter are great. I haven't used Pocket Word or Excel enough to say that Hancom is better, but I can definitally say that the Zaurus version matches the Pocket PC office suit. Pocket PC doesn't even come with a PowerPoint viewer. The media player supports both high bandwidth MP3s (352 kbps) and low bandwidth (16 kbps). It also comes with a built in MPEG-1 player. However, theKompany.com has an excellent video player that supports AVIs,MPEGs, Quicktime movies etc... that you will want to upgrade to for serious movie watching. The games are fun too ^_^. Hardware: The Zaurus again matches the Pocket PC, with 206 MHZ intel strong ARM CPU, 64 MB RAM and a 240 x 320 screen. The only other Pocket PC that outdoes this is the Toshiba e710 with a 400 MHZ CPU, but if you want something of that caliber, check out the Zaurus SL-5600 (with 96 MB RAM and 400 MHZ). Yet another place where the Zaurus wins is support for both CompactFlash and SecureDigital built in. You can take a picture with your CF digital camera, pop out the CF from it and view the images on your Zaurus. It also has a built in QWERTY key board built in (which I'm typing on) and an IR port. Wi-Fi and Internet: While it doesn't have a wi-fi card built in, it's very easy to add one. Just pop in a wireless LAN card or Wi-Fi compatible card, and your ready to go. No drivers to load. Nothing. I popped my D-Link 650w CF card and started using the router. Browsing FTPs and surfing the net is fast and easy. I do alot of my internet browsing on my zaurus. I surf using Opera or Konqeror, I use Opie FTP to browse servers, and I use KMerling to Instant Message. The E-Mail app is good too, supporting attachments and scripted e-mails. Syncing: Intellisync is very good. I run it on Windows XP and I've synced it with Outlook 2000 and 2002. The Task List, Calender, and Datebook apps are good, but not as good as the Franklin Covey apps available for Pocket PC and Palm. I've had no problems syncing. You can even sync wirelessly (if you know what you're doing). Overall, the Zaurus is a great choice for anyone. Developers, Novices,and Experts.
Rating:
Summary: Only for anti-socials
Review: If 60% of PDA users use Palm and 35% use Pocket PC/WinCE, why be the last 5% that use something nobody really cares about? As a Mac user I learned the pains of living on the fringe, and my advice to any potential Zaurus shopper is, stick with a mainstream device, i.e., Pocket PC or Palm. The Zaurus sports a nice hardware design, something you'd expect from a Japanese company. The software, while stable, is very unpolished and VERY confusing. There's also a lack of clear integration as on the Palm and also Pocket PC. Free software? You get what you pay for... In short, not quite worth the money and the label of an anti-social.
Rating:
Summary: I love it!
Review: This was my first PDA ... but I had been looking hard at the Palm and Handspring PDA's before I got this one. It's really feature rich and I have no problem synching with my laptop and my desktop. I also like the fact that there are two card slots, one compactflash (CF) and one secure digital SD slot. So there's tons of room to store all kinds of stuff. Aside from the calendar, to do list and word/excel spreadsheet uses, I also use my zaurus as an MP3 player.. works great with MP3's running off one of the cards. If you want a great PDA, this is the one to get! .. oh, did I mention the mini keyboard that is only a click away under the navigation buttons???
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