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Spreadsheet (Hancom MobileSheet)

This is another example of a really solid PDA application. It is fast, stable and provides strong compatibility with desktop Microsoft Excel. As far as I could tell, all the functionality of Excel is available here, and that's quite a feat. The various tool bars can be cycled through or disabled. Being able to quickly zoom in or out is great here, and the cell row and column markers are scaled automatically. Below you can see a couple of screen shots where I zoomed in and out a few levels. Click on each one to see the full sized image. Again these are from the SL-C750 but the only real difference on the SL-6000 is the "even better" screen.


The only caveat regarding the spreadsheet is that the XScale RISC CPU does not have a Floating Point Unit (FPU) and this means you'll find disproportionate speed differences between HancomSheet and OpenOffice or MS Excel if you try anything too elaborate. This is a shortcoming of all XScale-based systems and is nothing to do with linux or Windows.

Presentation Viewer (Hancom Presenter)

Hancom Presenter is a Presentation viewer that lets you view simple Presentation documents on the Mobile Device. Hancom Mobile Present offers stable slide show and pen marking of desktop Hancom Presenter and Microsoft Powerpoint files. This application is not installed by default but can be copied to the Zaurus from the CD-ROM.

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Games

Games? There are no games. This might come as a shock to fans of the 5000 series Zaurus, which had a lot of games on it.

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Multimedia

Music Player

The Zaurus Music Player can handle WAV and MP3 audio files. The MP3 sound quality is excellent and sounds very good through headphones.

This application is an improvement over the one which shipped with the 5000 series but is still disappointing. You can make playlists of files, but you can't save them. I would also have been nice to have a minimal display which was in a floating window, but I'm not sure the OS would allow this. The Music Player is definitely a candidate for being replaced with a third-party application after you get your Zaurus. As far as I can tell it is not possible to uninstall applications you didn't add yourself, so even if you replace the Music Player you won't easily be able to reclaim the storage space. The Music Player is shown on the left below.

Track Selection Music Player

Video Player

The movie player plays MPEG1 and MPEG2 movies, but not MPEG4 (DivX) in my tests. Playing a full screen MPEG film with the display rotated (to optimise the landscape mode) was really choppy.

Alternative video players are available for the Zaurus series from third parties - I use Kino 2 on my C860 but it doesn't quite work on the 6000 yet. Video playback is quite a hot topic with Zaurus users so I expect a fast SL-6000 compatible player will appear soon if it hasn't already.

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Networking

I very easily set up a Wi-Fi connection for my home WLAN. It was as simple as following the prompts in the Network Setup Wizard which is under the Settings Tab. The Wi-Fi hub in this case was an SMC Barricade 7004VWBR, using 64-bit encryption. VPN options on the SL-6000 include IPsec but I did not test this.

One of the obvious uses for the SL-6000L is outdoor web surfing so I tested it in Bryant Park, which is a free Wi-Fi zone near the New York Library:

Access Page Signal Strength

It was pretty cool to be able to do that, but I had to turn to put the Zaurus in shadow or I couldn't see the screen. Also, don't expect to spend the day net surfing unless you've got a pocket full of spare batteries!

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Email

This is a fairly advanced email client. It offers multiple mail boxes and accounts, filtering, download rules, file attachments, and can be used either as a stand-alone email client (if the Zaurus is networked) or as a synchronized partner application to Outlook. You can also switch back and forth between internal email folders on a CF or SD card. The email client supports POP3 and IMAP4 but not secure IMAP. The lack of secure IMAP support is probably the main problem with this emailer; in other respects it is very good.

The email system is well integrated with the Address Book, allowing easy transfer of addresses between the two. If you haven't networked the Zaurus then you can write "synchronization emails" offline and send them from your Outlook account. A few screenshots are below; click on each one for the full view. The "Synchronization" email box contains messages which will be sent through Outlook next time you synchronise.

Account setup Folders Inbox View

Although I didn't use the email client on my 5600 much, I use it a lot on my C860 just because it has now reached the point of being able to fit a page across the screen. The same is almost true with the 6000 here, except that the screen is in portrait mode; if you switch to landscape mode then you lose the keyboard. One other thing about email on the 6000 is that the version of Qtopia mail is out of date - my C860 has version 2.3 of the mail program, and it has one vital feature called "multi-select mode" where you can select multiple messages for (e.g.) deletion, rather than having to delete them individually. This feature is missing on the SL-6000, which is running only version 2.1. It's a "deal breaker" for me - as you'll see from the big version of the right hand image, I get a lot of junk mail and deleting that rubbish needs to be easy.

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Opera Web Browser

The Opera web browser is an excellent application which is the match of any desktop browser and has some outstanding PDA-friendly features. You can scale the whole page you're viewing anywhere between 20% and 400%, you can choose to render images or not, you can go full-screen with or without scroll bars, and on top of that there's a feature called "content column layout" which attempts to give you a cut-down version of the page without any substantial formatting or images. I found this gave mixed results on complex pages but helped on simpler ones which were badly designed for PDAs. The browser also has a total of 17 keyboard shortcuts for common functions.

Here are some Opera screenshots - they should speak for themselves; Opera is awesome.


bargainPDA google BBC "Low Graphics"


BBC Front Page

In the lowest image, Opera is running in full screen mode and I scaled the view so that the whole page fit the screen (this is the regular BBC page, although I usually visit the low graphics version just because it loads faster. You'll notice that the font gets a bit lumpy when you scale the page; it never looks as nice as it did at 100%.

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Other Software

A few other applications come pre-installed. They're pretty basic; you might weant to see screen shots of the Clock and Stopwatch, City Time and Image Viewer. There's also a Text Editor; it is very basic and doesn't handle file extensions well. Better text editors are avalable free.

Several more apps are on the CD. Installing extra applications is easy - copy the .ipk file to the Zaurus, run it, decide if you want to install the software internally or on a CF or SD card, and you're done. Any application you install yourself can be uninstalled easily using the Add/Remove Programs tool, and trying to install a later package of something you already installed prompts you to remove the previous version before you get into trouble.

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Software Availability and Support

The Zaurus community is pretty strong, with various message boards and news groups where you can ask questions or download goodies. The best all-round site is the Zaurus User Group, and the best centralised software site is The Zaurus Software Index. Both will help you find commercial and free software for the Zaurus, as well as custom ROMs and "advanced stuff" like that.

If all you need is the basic office functionality, you will get that pre-installed. If you're a regular linux user and want SSH, Samba, or wireless sniffers, you can get it from the link above. There are some glaring gaps in the Zaurus software stable; one example is the lack of a Zaurus RealAudio Player. Other proprietary formats such as Adobe PDF are supported but not all that well. If your expected usage hinges on any of these formats or products, try before you buy, or post some questions on one of the message boards or newsgroups.

Note to other Zaurus users: I also tested a number of other applications which I use regularly on the SL-5600 and SL-C860. SafeDee, probably my favourite application on the Zaurus, is fine if you get the latest version (2.0.2). TheKompany's tkcPlayer and tkcEditor were also fine in the Cxx0 versions. Some appllications need to be told not to scale the screen (press and hold the icon to see this option), for example QPDF and QKonsole. The VNC client and server software works fine as I showed before.

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Linux in your Pocket

Aside from being a powerful and very stable OS (I didn't need to reboot once), linux does have a strong following and there's lots of support available on the Internet as I detailed in the previous section.

You can completely avoid the command line on the Zaurus, but it would be a great shame to do so. The command line (usually accessed via a terminal application, which is loosely equivalent to a DOS Shell in Windows) is really very powerful. If you've ever used DOS or written batch files for Windows, you can get an idea of the (vastly superior) capabilities of the command line scripting system from the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide by Mendel Cooper. A few screen shots are below showing the terminal application in use:

 

You can also connect to your Zaurus via telnet or SSH and use the system as you would any linux box; either through the network or the USB cradle.

The Zaurus does an impressive job of feeling like a big computer in a little box. For me, the C860 clamshell device I use daily has made a good laptop replacement, and I'm not sure that I would trade it for the SL-6000. This is just because of the utility of the landscape screen with the QWERTY keyboard. I would definitely trade in the C860 screen for the SL-6000 screen though, if I could!

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Conclusion

This is a nicely designed, rugged device with a solid, versatile OS, exceptional screen and good battery life. Above and beyond what many people expect from a PDA, if you need to edit Word or Excel documents, this device will put laptop power in your hand, literally. Having used the SL-6000 for a few weeks, I really like its style - tough but not too heavy; the simple design and rounded corners make it very easy to get used to. I can also say that it not too large.

If your most important requirement is the PIM functionality, this is probably not the device for you. If Office and OpenOffice compatibility, networking (including browsing the web), programming or any kind of image viewing are high on your priority list, this is an excellent choice, possibly the best, although it comes with a hefty price tag.

Pros

Cons

Pricing and Availability
You can buy the Sharp Zaurus SL-6000 from Amazon and PCConnection, priced at $650-$700.

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