Sharp Zaurus SL-C860 Linux PDA

Posted by Lisa Gade, Editor in Chief, posted Feb. 5, 2004

Note the Zaurus C3000 and C1000 have replaced the C860

The Zaurus C860 is an elegant and highly portable Linux-based PDA that sports a clamshell design. You can use the machine in laptop mode, or swivel the display and use it in portrait orientation like a traditional slate-design PDA. It has a 400 MHz XScale processor, CF and SD slots, plenty of RAM and won't lose your data, even if the battery runs out. It has the same amazing CG Silicon display used in the C760 (only available in Sharp products) which is incredibly color saturated, bright and sharp. It also has the best keyboard I've used on a PDA.

Why doesn't Sharp sell this wonderful machine in the US?! While the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 and 5600 models, which have a traditional PDA shape and are sold in the US have enjoyed limited success here, the C series would likely sell quite well. Perhaps now that Sony has shown us with their UX50 that clamshell mini-notebook designed PDAs can do well in the US market, Sharp will reconsider .

The C860 replaces the C760, and if you're a C760 owner, there's little reason to upgrade to the C860 since the hardware remains unchanged other than changes to the casing color and some keyboard keys. Despite the big jump in model numbers, the C860 has only two significant software additions: the ability to mount the Zaurus as a drive on your desktop and a very good Japanese<->English translator. The C860 is available from importers such as Dynamism, who was kind enough to send us this review unit. In fact, I fell in love with the unit and bought it! While a few other vendors sell the Zaurus in the US, Dynamism has the units ready to go when you order, and they are translated into English. They also warranty the Zaurus for one year and will FedEx the unit back to Japan for repair, since Sharp doesn't offer direct warranty on C series Zaurii sold outside Japan.

Design and Ergonomics

The Zaurus C860 looks like a highly miniaturized notebook PC. It's got a classy silver finish and the casing is made of plastic. It's surprisingly portable, and is in the same general ballpark as other mid to large sized PDAs . The unit can be used in clamshell (notebook style) mode or you can swivel and rotate the display to use the Zaurus in tablet mode in portrait orientation. The screen orientation automatically changes when you swivel the unit between clamshell and portrait mode, though you can override this and change the orientation to suit yourself using the included rotation app on the start menu.

Questions? Comments?
Post them in our Discussion Forum!

Display

The screen is absolutely fabulous, and is one of the best I've seen on a PDA or any other device. It uses CG Silicon technology (Continuous Grain Silicon ) which is smaller, thinner, brighter yet more energy efficient. The screen is extremely bright, contrasty, sharp and very color saturated. When viewing images on a CF card taken with my 5 megapixel digicam, they actually look better on the Zaurus than on a traditional monitor or my high end Sony LCD! It's hard to imagine what this display looks like— you really must see it in person. The closest competitor is the XBRITE technology used on the Sony Vaio TR2A notebook. Despite the large number of pixels crammed into the 3.7" LCD, text remains sharp and very readable. It's a rare pleasure to find a PDA with VGA (640 x 480) resolution and my beloved Toshiba e805 Pocket PC is the only other VGA resolution PDA commonly available in the US. However, you must install 3rd party software to have all apps run in VGA on the e805, and landscape mode is only supported via that 3rd party software hack. The C860's native landscape VGA display in conjunction with the excellent keyboard really make for a wonderful web browsing experience using the included NetFront, and is perfect for working with spreadsheets and Word documents.

However, if your eyes are older or not very good, you may suffer eyestrain, despite the sharpness of the display. Text is quite small, but you can enlarge it by changing the font in the current app or by using the built-in zoom feature of the Zaurus. The C860 has two Fn keys that offers 5 levels of zoom. The zoom feature affects text size in most all applications, but doesn't change the size of graphics (which is a good thing!). The zoom feature will resize icons in the Zaurus home launcher, and those are the only graphical items that are zoomable.

Keyboard

The keyboard on the C860 is my absolute favorite! I was thumb-typing at 40 WPM as soon as I took it out of the box, and am even faster after a week using the device. It's the roomiest of any current PDA with the exception of the much larger NEC MobilePro 900, which isn't really in the PDA category. Compared to the Sony Clié UX50 & UX40, this keyboard's keys are easier to press, have greater spacing (since the Zaurus is larger than the UX) and offer a bit more travel and tactile feedback. Of course, they don't light up as do the UX and recent NX Clié keyboards. The Sharp C860 keys are made of a vinyl-like material rather than hard plastic. The Zaurus has a full English keyboard, a dedicated number row, two shift keys (yay!), arrow keys for navigation, OK and Cancel buttons, and quick launch keys for the calendar, address book, mail application, as well as buttons for Home and menu activation. To enter punctuation and common symbols, you'll use the single function key in conjunction with one of the keyboard keys. You can also use the function key for cut, paste and copy functions, and there's a caps lock key. Thumb typing is a breeze on this keyboard. If you like, you can turn on key click sounds to aid you in typing.

Compatibility and Expandability

The Zaurus has both an SD slot and a CF type II slot that can accommodate type I and type II expansion cards. Note that you can use the SD slot for memory cards, but it doesn't support SDIO. I tested several brands of SD and CF Memory cards and they worked fine. I tried several CF WiFi cards that worked without additional drivers: Ambicom, D-Link, SMC and Socket (though the Socket didn't get a strong signal in the C760, the newer drivers pre-installed on the C860 worked well and the Socket card had normal range). My favorite card has been the Ambicom since it's reasonably priced, uses little power, has a small antenna cap and works well with 3rd party networking apps like Kismet. The network configuration utility is very friendly and easy to use, and you should be able to get online with the Z in no time. While the networking utility doesn't offer site survey, it does allow you to use an SSID of "any", so you can pick up any available open wireless network. Kismet is a great site survey and sniffer app for the Zaurus, and we've included it in our review of must have apps for the Zaurus. We've also published a review of the Ambicom CF Bluetooth card which works with the Z (the earlier rev Ambicom card with the black antenna cap works, while the newer rev with the purple cap and LED doesn't). In addition, the Socket 10/100 Ethernet and Low Powered 10 baseT wired Ethernet cards worked perfectly with the Zaurus, as do standard 56k dial up modem cards — no extra drivers needed. The Socket CF Bluetooth card also works with the C860. Be warned that while WiFi, wired Ethernet and dial up PPP modem networking support is built into the OS and requires no hacking, you will have to install free open source 3rd party software (BlueZ) and edit a few files in the terminal to get Bluetooth up and running.

Many Zaurus apps written for the SL-5500 and SL-5600 models worked fine. Since these models have 240 x 320 displays, the Zaurus will run its display at 240 x 320 for these apps. All of the included applications run in VGA on the C860, and there are quite a few 3rd party apps that also support full screen display. And of course C7xx series software works fine.

For power users, one of the great appeals of the Zaurus is loading custom ROMs. In simple terms, these are alternative Linux operating systems compiled for and tailored to the Zaurus and it's ARM family processor. Think of it as switching Linux distributions, if you're a Linux-saavy person. Some of the more popular ROMs for the C860 include Cacko's ROM, tkcROM and X11. You can find links to these ROMs on the Zaurus User's Group downloads page.

Battery Life

The Sharp C860 comes with a 1700 mA Lithium Ion battery. This is a larger battery than the C700 and C750 models had. Since the battery pack is thicker and sticks out a bit on the bottom, Sharp has added a black plastic cover that covers the entire bottom of the PDA making for an even surface, rather than having a bulge in the battery section. You could also run the lower capacity thinner standard battery, in which case you wouldn't use the black bottom plate, but instead use the silver plastic battery door which is included. This will reduce the thickness of the unit by 5mm.

With brightness set one notch from the top (that's very bright!) the battery easily lasted me through the day when I used the PIM apps, Hancom Word and Sheet, played some games and surfed for two hours. If you use WiFi continuously, you should get at least 3 hours run time and likely more (this will vary depending on the power efficiency of the card you use and the signal strength of your access point). The C860 beats most other recent Palm OS and Pocket PC devices on battery run times, thanks to the power-frugal CG display, large battery and good power management. That said, the unit takes a while to charge since it has a large battery and a conservative 1 amp charger (most PDA chargers are 2 amp). It will take 4 hours to charge a battery that's been drained to 15% charge.

Software Bundle

If you've used other Sharp Zaurus models running Linux in the past, then the OS and included applications will no doubt be familiar. Dynamism has done a great job converting the unit to English, and pretty much everything but the help files have been translated. The C860 uses the same launcher as the SL-5xxx and prior C7xx models, and has most of the same applications, including an email client that supports SMTP authentication and multiple accounts and both IMAP4 and POP3 protocols, a backup app, an MP3 player, video player (only plays .ASF MP4 file format which is used by the Sharp video recorder sold in Japan), Terminal (have a blast with the command line and the Z's bash shell), a text editor (won't work with system and conf files, so use vi or get a copy of the free nano port to edit your system config files), image viewer and editor, voice recorder (though there is no built-in mic on the Z, so you'll have to use an external mic or talk into the left earpiece of you stereo headphones— really! ), a camera app (should you buy the accessory Sharp CF digicam), and more. Of course, the unit comes with standard PIM apps: calendar, To Do list, and an address book. Note that the address book doesn't sort on the English alphabet. When you first sync your contacts from Outlook to the Z, they'll be alphabetical. However newly added contacts will be appended to the bottom of the list, regardless of their place in the English alphabet. The address book's quick-navigation tabs are labeled "ai", "ka", "sa" and so on, which works great if all your acquaintances are Japanese . You also get the capable Hancom Mobile Office Suite which allows you to view and edit MS Word, Excel and powerPoint documents. For Internet browsing, Sharp has included the excellent NetFront v.3 web browser, rather than Opera, which is found on the SL-5500 and 5600 models sold in the US. NetFront supports most all current web standards and allows you to open multiple windows. It can handle web pages encoded in Japanese as well as English, and it's very cool to visit a Japanese web site, copy the text of the page then paste it into the included E/J Translator. E/J is a very good translator, and beats Bablefish (Alta Vista's web-based translation service). It's also quite useful if you're trying to learn Japanese or travel to Japan frequently for business.

The C860 comes with desktop syncing software that's in Japanese, and as mentioned earlier, is not readable even for Japanese speakers. It looks to be a combination of the usual Qtopia desktop by Trolltech, Intellisync, and Sharp's Zaurus Shot for capturing your PC's screen on the Zaurus. I was able to mount the Z as a drive under Windows via USB using this software, but I couldn't sync my PIM info. The best method for syncing to Outlook in Windows is to download the SL-5500 3.1 ROM update which includes an English version of Intellisync. That version plays nicely with the C860 series, but be sure to use the C7xx drivers that came on your CD rather than those in the ROM update when Windows prompts you for drivers. I use this method myself, and am able to reliably sync my Outlook data, as well as transfer files and back up the Z .

If you're interested in additional software for the Zaurus line, killefiz.de/zaurus and zaurus.spy.org are good places to start. The former gives you descriptions of the software and is categorized, while the later has a great deal of links to informative sites. zaurus.spy.org/feeds/docs-zaurus-com/ and www.zaurususergroup.com/feed/ also have a true "feed", which means you can use it as an "Install packages via networks" location. Among commercial software makers supporting the C860, theKompany.com is probably the biggest and one of the best offering turn key apps.

Conclusion

Pro: An absolutely gorgeous VGA display that is head and shoulders above others. Best keyboard on a PDA makes typing surprisingly painless. The large display, speed and keyboard make this feel like a viable laptop replacement. Your data remains intact even if the battery runs dry. Excellent battery life. Linux OS is robust, fast and has great support for networking. Many apps are open source and free. Has good expansion with the SD slot, and the CF slot which works with WiFi, Ethernet, dial up modems, Sharp digicam and GPS. You can customize the Z to suit yourself by hacking the system and/or loading custom ROMs. While not tiny, it fits in your pocket and doesn't cry for a case given the clamshell design that protects the display. Con: Manual and CD are in Japanese, as is the syncing software. You'll need to download and install a version of the syncing software that works in English from www.myzaurus.com. On a high end device, I'd really like to see built in WiFi and maybe Bluetooth on this perfect mini-Net surfer. The Sony Clié UX50 clearly beats it in this respect and even adds an integrated digicam. Not a great selection of Zaurus Linux software available, though much of what is available is free or inexpensive.

Dynamism list price $849. Includes English conversion, unit, USB sync cable, charger, extended battery, battery door for smaller battery (smaller battery not included), Japanese printed manual and CD ROM.

Specs: