OS and Basic Screen Navigation

At the top level, this looks like any PDA OS. The underlying Operating System is OpenPDA from Metrowerks (a company owned by Motorola). The GUI is Qtopia from Trolltech. This is a very well established system and has a good user and developer base. It also benefits from a certain amount of cross-platform portability, meaning that software can easily be translated from other systems to this one.

The main functionality is organised into four Home Pages or "Tabs": Applications, Java, Settings and Files. The Java Tab seems completely pointless, and I was glad to find that it disappears if you reset the flash memory as I have done several times while testing the device (if you want it back, you can reinstall from a package on the CD). I won't bore you with describing the three Java "applications " on the SL-6000. Their only worthy feature is that Java apps run in resizable and movable windows, which is a big deal when you have this much screen real estate. One day all windows will be movable and resizable (imagine that!).

You can add your own Home tabs, including a custom icon from a choice of what looks like hundreds. You cannot edit the system tabs. The pictures below show the four default Home Tabs; clicking on each one will open a new window in your browser showing the actual screenshot. All these screen shots are in portrait mode, but I only did this so they'd fit the review page better. They work just as well with the screen rotated 90 degrees.

Applications	Java
System Settings	The File Manager

You can change the theme of the interface easily using the Appearance tool in the Settings Home Page; the differences are significant but not Earth-shattering. You can also set a graphical backdrop to the Home Tabs (other than the File Manager). This doesn't seem to slow the interface down, and it has the potential to look great on this display.

Zoom Zoom

One feature of the SL-6000 which affects many applications is the "zoom" capability. Using the Qtopia menu items (ZoomIn and ZoomOut you can zoom in and out in most application displays. What this really means is scaling the font and usually some other window furniture (e.g. column markers in a spreadsheet). It is very effective, and only limited by the font you are using. I made an animation of this when I reviewed the C750 last year - click here to see it.

Help System

The Qtopia GUI includes a customised help system which offers help on just about anything with an icon. It looks like a basic web browser and would be very useful to someone just starting out with the PDA. Once you've skimmed the manual I doubt it would be much help, but it does provide a good introduction.

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Personal Information Management (PIM) Tools

PIM Applications: Address Book, Calendar, ToDo List.

The Address book is pretty standard - adding, deleting and editing entries is easy. You can choose which fields appear on the list and their order, as well as the overall sort order. The display uses colour very well.

Contacts can be beamed back and forth between the Zaurus and any other IR-capable PDA easily, although only one at a time from what I could tell, using .vcf files. I was hoping that I'd be able to hold the Zaurus near a telephone and have it tone-dial a number for me, but it can't do that.

The Calendar allows a day, week, month and year view and you can set up reminders, repeating events, and so on. In the month view you can have a text format (which soon gets crowded) or graphical, which uses colour coded stripes to show events. This works well. Having used the application for some time on my 5600, I have found a few things which are annoying. For example, setting an appointment to repeat daily results in an entry in the calendar for every day forever. It would be so much nicer if it just updated each day to indicate the next scheduled event.

Day View	Month View	Year View

The ToDo list, like the Calendar and Adress book, is adequate. It syncs with Outlook or Qtopia Desktop and is fairly useful for managing jobs. Items on the ToDo list do appear on the one-day view of the calendar. That's the limit of the integration between the applications.

The PIM Suite is almost identical to the one on the current Zaurus 5000 series ROMs. I know some users hate it; I think it is adequate, but for a long time I used a plain text file for my address book (it's random access, easy to search, and can contain any fields you like in any order...). From reading posts on mailing lists and newsgroups, the consensus seems to be that the bundled Zaurus apps can't touch DateBook on the Palm platform. There are third-party applications available for the 5000 series (e.g. from theKompany) but I don't know how much they add or - at this point - whether they'll work on the SL-6000.

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Syncing and the PC Software

Syncing is perfectly straightforward. The software installed quickly and without incident on my Windows 2000 machine (linux sync is not explicitly supported). You decide at install time whether you want to sync with Microsoft Outlook or with Qtopia Desktop, which is a standalone application. There is also an option to sync with Palm Desktop, which I have never tried. I chose Outlook in this case.

The actual process of syncing with Outlook or Qtopia Desktop is very robust and quite fast. You can choose whether to synchronise both ways or just one or the other, as well as selecting which types of data are transferred, and so on. You can initiate the synchronisation process either via software (from either end) or by pressing a button marked SYNC on the cradle.

Once you're comfortable with good old "USB I/O" you can (and should) graduate to "USB TCP/IP", which allows you to connect to your Zaurus via telnet, or ssh (secure shell) if you install an extra package. It also lets you use the drives like network folders in Windows rather than using the clumsy FTP interface you get by default.

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Bundled Software: Hancom Office

Word Processor (Hancom MobileWord)

Hancom MobileWord provides a very high level of word processor functionality, and is an application I have used a lot on my 5600 and C860. The version on the SL-6000 is 1.6.0 compared to 1.5.0 on previous models but the functional differences are not listed anywhere that I could find. As far as I can see, the only difference is compatiblity with the SL-6000.

You can load and save Microsoft Word compatible documents as well as Hancom's own format which is slightly more compact. Most of the Word features I use on a desktop PC are there with the exception of an equation editor and the more exotic "Save As..." options, e.g. Save As HTML. Even with these constraints, I think that Hancom MobileWord is one of the best pieces of software on the OpenPDA platform.

MobileWord benefits enormously from the 640x480 screen in landscape format, and fully supports the Zoom-Zoom feature. You can now fit a full page of text across the screen; although the writing is pretty tiny, it's still perfectly readable. Coupled with an external keyboard (which could be IR if you rotate the screen to have the IR port pointing toward you) this would be an adequate mobile office. Some screen shots are below. Note that these are from the C750 review - the functionality is identical. The only difference is the "A" icon on the icon bar, which is not on the SL-6000.