Display

The screen is a 4" diagonal, 640×480 16-bit (65000 colour) display, but most of the time you'll see it as 480×640, i.e., in portrait mode. The clarity and contrast are excellent, and this is the best screen I have ever seen on a handheld device. The screen is definitely better than the one in the Zaurus SL-C750/760/860 models, and those are already very, very nice. The application icons use colour very well and web pages look fine, as do photographs opened in the image viewer. There were no visible bad pixels in the review device. Most of the screen shots here have been included as-is without scaling, but do not represent the actual brightness and contrast of the display because they're just bitmaps. Having said that, I would say that the display quality of the SL-6000 is close to that of a desktop monitor. Just think about that for a moment.

The comparison shot below shows quite nicely the differences between the Zaurus screens. On the left is the C860, transreflective 480×640 screen, in portrait mode. This screen is very bright but at the higher brightness settings it lacks contrast and looks quite washed out. The same screen is used in the C750 and C760 models. On the right is the SL-5600, which uses a front-lit 240×320 screen and comes in a poor third in this comparison (although it is much more usable in direct sunlight). The same screen is used in the 5500 model; it has been criticised for being dark in the top right corner (because the frontlight doesn't extend all the way to the top) as well as the general problem that the light is on the right of the screen and the display appears brighter there as a result. The middle device is the SL-6000, a transreflective 480×640 screen, which maintains excellent contrast and colour depth even at the highest brightness settings. The transreflective screens are back-lit and both look much more even, as I hope you can see.

The light is an excellent backlight, very even and giving good colour representation. The brightness can be varied using a tool in the Settings page, but not using keyboard shortcuts as was possible on the C750 style devices.

In terms of real estate the 4" screen feels significantly larger than the previous Zaurus models', and the resolution is so high that you can hardly see the pixels. To get a pixel-for-pixel comparison I used the SL-6000 to connect to my SL-5600 using VNC (Virtual Network Computing):

This is a real screenshot from the SL-6000, not a joke. The SL-6000 is running the Sharp ROM build of Opie-Keypebble VNC Viewer, and the SL-5600 is running the Zaurus VNC server from SDG Systems.

That was a rather silly test but it nicely introduces my one criticism of the way the high resolution screen has been used on the 6000; all they really did is make the icons bigger (and nicer, admittedly) when I would have liked to see an option to use small fonts and small icons, small window furniture (those default scroll bars are 32 pixels wide!!) and so on. The inset SL-5600 screen above is perfectly usable on the 6000. Even if it's not usable, I'd like the option to go blind trying.

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Portrait Mode and Buttons

There are nine hardware buttons on the front of the SL-6000 plus a directional cursor pad, shown below, which has a central Action button. Immediately to the left of the cursor pad is the Cancel button. The button above Cancel just has a single dot on it, so I'll call it the Dot button. The manual calls it the OK key, but that overlaps with the real OK key. I think they could have been a little more imaginative.

The Zaurus SL-6000's buttons

The light button allows you to turn the light on and off very quickly (a single quick tap). Holding it down for a few seconds rotates the screen to landscape mode and back.The orientation of the landscape mode can be changed in the Settings --> Appearance applet.

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Stylus

The SL-6000 stylus is pretty standard, plain black plastic, 4" long. This just a longer version of the styli shipped with the current 5000 series and clamshell devices. As pointing devices go, this is hardly designed for the Power User. It's not ergonomically designed. It's not even all that well made, and it feels hollow. With my C860 I rarely use the standard stylus, preferring to use a "replacement" iPaq stylus I bought.

When not in use the stylus lives along the right hand edge of the screen. This is slightly inconvenient for left-handed users like me but it could be worse. In fact, if you use the screen protector, it is worse - it's almost impossible to get the stylus with your left hand due to the way the protector clips onto the device.

The touch-screen is accurate and sensitive and did not need recalibrating while I was testing the unit. I tested writing on the Imagepad notepad (you can literally "draw" on the screen) and it was pretty impressive. The lack of friction, and not being able to press hard made my writing a bit messy though.

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Memory

The nominal memory on the device breaks down into 64MB Flash, 8 MB ROM and 64 MB SDRAM. In real usage (running Hancom Word and browsing the web with Opera) the memory on the review device translates into something like the following:

Memory: Total 62048 KB, 37588 kB used, 24376 kB free

Storage: Internal Flash total 29696 kB, 28408 kB used, 1288 kB Available. So, of my 64MB RAM, two thirds has been used up.

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Keyboard

The SL-6000 keyboard is revealed by sliding the cursor pad downwards as in previous models. The keys themselves are invidiually mounted and have good tactile response. On our device the keys were actually a little hard to press down and my fingers got a bit tired - don't laugh, it makes a difference if you really are writing a lot. I wouldn't say the stiff keys are a serious problem. On the bright side; after a few months of this your thumbs will be so buff you'll be ready for the Pro Thumb-Wrestling Circuit.

Here is a close-up of the keyboard:

The picture above is cut from a Sharp press picture which is probably not real (it looks like CGI). The special Fn characters in orange on the keyboard can be really hard to see, and I couldn't get any nice-looking photographs of them. This is a problem when using the SL-6000 in any kind of direct light, and is worst in direct sunlight.

Below is a side-by-side comparison, C860 (left) and SL-6000, in the Real World. The C860 keyboard is great, whereas the 6000's is just pretty good. I have written most of this review on the C860 and found it very comfortable; if you expect to type an awful lot, the larger keyboard on the C860 may make a huge difference for you. Apart from the size, the other main change is that the C860's keyboard has an extra row of keys for the numbers so you can get them without pressing Fn.