Other Input Options

Aside from the physical keyboard there are Graphical Keyboard, Pickboard, Handwriting Recognition and Unicode. These are software rather than hardware but I'll cover them here.

Graphical Keyboard is a picture of a keyboard. If you have the real keyboard open,you'll only need this if you can't a find puctuation symbol or something like that. This could have been a convenient way to learn where the "tricky" characters are mapped on the real keyboard, but it isn't - there's no Fn key, characters are in different places or missing, and as it happens the functionality of the virtual Caps key is just wrong - it just does the same as Shift. If you have the PDA in portrait mode (with the physical keyboard hidden) and want to enter more than a few words, I think it will still be faster to switch back, type your stuff, and revert. Here's a picture of the Graphical Keyboard:

The Pickboard (below) lets you select sequences of letters, and it tries to guess the word based on the minimum number of letters you supply. Here I had selected the letters h-e-l-l and the system was ready to guess "hello". Big deal. On a longer word I still had to hit most of the letters, and sometimes the actual word (if it was even there) didn't appear until the very last letter - that is, I had to tap exactly as many times as there were letters in the word.

[click to view image]

Handwriting Recognition is excellent although you may need to train it for one or two characters. For example, I write the letter 'o' with a clockwise circle, probably because I'm left-handed, but the Zaurus offers no match at all to that. If I remember to write it anti-clockwise, it works fine. Alternatively there is a powerful 'trainer' accessible by touching a button on the right of the handwriting pad, which lets you watch the expected stylus strokes for each symbol and if necessary retrain the system. I have done this with the 'o' which now works every time, and I just learned how to write the 'k' which was also not being recognised. The first picture here shows the handwriting input pad, which also offers a guess like the pickboard. Again, this is after entering the first few letters of "hello":

...And this one shows the training tool. You can also any of the default patterns and design your own shorthand versions. It's fun and effective, but I wouldn't want to write an 8,000 word review using this input method.

Unicode gives you access to a standardised, expandable character set in tabular form. Unicode entry is shown below; available character sets are Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, General Puctuation and Currency Symbols. It is probably easy to add more - other Zaurus ROMs have as many as 16 sets available.

The keyboard alternatives are essential once the screen is rotated into landscape mode, just because the keyboard is hidden.

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Battery and Battery Life

The SL-6000 comes with one removable battery rated at 1500 mAh. Short battery life was one criticism levelled at the SL-5500 but corrected in the SL-5600 (with an 1800 mAh battery). Whilst some previous models could trade batteries, this one is an entirely new design; it's wide and thin as you can hopefully see below:

The battery life is quoted in the manual as being anywhere up to 11 hrs. In my tests the 6000 did a great job until I activated the Wi-Fi connection and then bam! Down 25%! I don't know if there's such a thing as low power Wi-Fi; my other Zaurus devices are the same, so just don't use the Wi-Fi unless you need it.

I tested the 6000 with Wi-Fi on constantly and the light on maximum; it lasted almost exactly two hours from fully charged to unusable. A battery which had been conditioned (charged & discharged) more would probably last longer.

Without the Wi-Fi running, the 6000 does last ages - at leat 6 to 8 hrs depending upon usage. On a 2 hour stretch (about the longest I've really used the 6000 continually, without allowing the battery to rest) while editing text and running programs, the battery indicator on the icon bar hardly moved and the power screen (which comes up when you tap the battery icon) showed something like a 90% or 95% charge.

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USB Host Capability

One of the new features of the SL-6000 is the USB host which is accessible via a Mini A connector on the bottom of the device. Some devices (e.g. USB keyboard) can be connected and used out of the box, whereas other hardware may be identified but will lack drivers. I tried connecting my SL-C860, which actually identifies itself as an SL-C750/760 as you can see here:

Although there's no good reason to use the USB connection for this, it's a neat trick and suggests that the SL-6000's USB host is properly enabled. Once a few developers get their hands on the SL-6000, drivers will probably be cropping up for everything from external hard drives to controlling automated telescopes.

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Speaker and Microphone

The SL-6000 sports an excellent mono speaker. The sound quality is equivalent to a small radio and the volume is good enough that it would serve as a very good alarm clock. I've even used it to listen to MP3s.

The built-in microphone is good enough to make voice recordings or to use the device as a telephone. You could easily do this by holding the SL-6000 to your ear and speaking into the microphone; in fact, according to reports, the SL-6000 audio I/O system was specifically designed with Voice-Over-IP ("VOIP") in mind.

Initially I was surprised to see a 2.5 mm jack on the SL-6000, particularly because my old SL-5600's main function is as an MP3 player. But, it looks like the audio jack is for telephone connectors before headphones. I tested it with a mobile phone headset and it worked very nicely playing music into my ear and recording my voice, but I didn't have the opportunity to test it as a phone.

Given that one of the key devices which is compatible with the SL-6000 is the Sprint 1xRTT Modem (drivers from from SDG Systems), this may be a significant part of the Enterprise design. Here's a grainy picture of the SL-6000 phone setup:

I took the picture with an Ericsson T610 phone and transferred it via Infra-Red to test that aspect of the hardware (astute readers will already have noted the reflection of the phone in the SL-6000 screen, along with my finger!). The IR transfer worked fine.