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Zaurus



         



Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 running OpenZaurus, with docking cradle and stylus

The Sharp Zaurus is the name of a series of Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) made by Sharp Corporation. The Zaurus was the most popular PDA during the 1990s in Japan and was based on a proprietary operating system. The first Sharp PDA to use a variant of the Linux operating system was the SL-5000D. The variant was Embedix Plus.

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Zaurus History

In September 1993, Sharp introduced the PI-3000, the first in the Zaurus line of PDAs. Featuring a black and white LCD screen, handwriting recognition, and optical communication capabilities among its features, the Zaurus soon became one of Sharp's flagship products.

The PI-4000, released in 1994, expanded the Zaurus' features with a built-in modem and facsimile functions. This was succeeded in 1995 by the PI-5000, which had e-mail and mobile phone interfaces, as well as PC linking capability. The Zaurus K-PDA was the first Zaurus to have a built-in keyboard in addition to handwriting recognition; the PI-6000 and PI-7000 in brought additional improvements.

During this time, Sharp was making significant advances in color LCD technology. In May of 1996, the first color Zaurus was released; the MI-10 and MI-10DC were equipped with a five-inch color thin-film transistor (TFT) LCD screen. This model had the ability to connect to the internet, and had a built-in camera and audio recorder. Later that year, Sharp developed a forty-inch TFT LCD screen, the world's largest at the time. In December, the MI-10/10DC Zaurus was chosen as the year's best product by Information Display Magazine in the United States.

Sharp continued to make advancements in display technology; the Zaurus gained additional multimedia capabilities, such as video playback, with the introduction of the MI-E1 in Japan in November of 2000. The MI-E1 was also the first Zaurus to support both Secure Digital and CompactFlash memory cards, a feature which would become standard on future models as well. Although the MI series was extremely popular in Japan, it was never released in either the USA or Europe - probably largely due to the strictly Japanese UI, which was never translated into any other language. As a result, the machines released outside Japan were the Linux based SL series, the first of which was the SL-5000D "developer edition." This was shortly followed by the SL-5500; both used 'Embedix', an embedded version of the Linux operating system developeed by Lineo. The development of the MI series in Japan was continued for a while, but the MI-E25DC has been officially declared to be the last MI-Series Zaurus.

Sharp has continued development of the SL series in Japan releasing the SLC-700, 750, 760 and 860 models which all feature 640x480 VGA screen resolution. They are all based on faster 400 Mhz Intel XScale technology, although the SLC-700 was flawed and the apparent speed was the same as the 206MHz SL-5500. All three of the SLC models are clamshell type devices with the unusual ability to rotate the screen. This allows the device to be used in 'landscape' mode with the keyboard, much like a miniature notebook PC, or in 'portrait' mode as a PDA. While these devices are not sold in the US or EU there is a very active 'grey market' on the internet. Devices from Japan are converted to English language and offered for resale through internet merchants.

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Zaurus models

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Zaurus software

With the switch to the Linux operating system the Zaurus became capable of running variations of a wide variety of proprietary and open source software, including web and FTP servers, databases, and compilers. Some developers have created an open source environment for the Zaurus called OpenZaurus, which uses the Opie graphical user interface and is designed for the ROM distributed with the Zaurus






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