Zowie! Zaurus!

We have come by an amazing device that's cool and it possesses an incredible geek quotient!

The device is Sharp's Zaurus SL-5500 - the first PDA built on Linux and sporting Java.

The Zaurus SL-5500 has a 206-MHz StrongArm SA-1110 processor, a Linux-based embedded operating system called Embedix3 from Lineo, the QT Palmtop Environment GUI from Trolltech AS, with Personal Java thrown in.

The form is a standard PDA style with a variety of buttons on the bottom quarter of the front. The display is a 240-by-320-pixel, 3.5-inch, 65,536-color reflective TFT LCD with front light, which is also touch-sensitive.

The Zaurus sports 64M bytes of synchronized dynamic RAM and 16M bytes of Flash read-only memory, and has a Compact Flash card slot and a Secure Digital card slot.

Unusually, the unit also has a standard keyboard hidden under a sliding cover. At first sight you might think that such a small keyboard would be useless, but it actually works quite well.

To integrate the device (which runs Qt/Embedded for calendaring and contacts) with your desktop, it comes with Intellisync (required if you want to synchronize the PDA with Microsoft Outlook) and Qtopia Desktop.

The graphical desktop presented by the QT Palmtop Environment is very good and the Zaurus' performance is excellent (under the hood it's Linux).

On the bundled software disk, there also is a terminal emulator that connects directly to the local operating system, giving you a BASH (that's the Bourne Again Shell) command line!

You can go to ZaurusZone and download a version of Virtual Network Computing compiled for the Zaurus. VNC was created by AT&T Laboratories and the University of Cambridge.

VNC is sort of like pcAnywhere but differs in that it is free and often seems to be faster. Anyway, you can use VNC to view and interact with the Zaurus display while sitting on your remote Linux or Windows or whatever machine.

You also can telnet in! Yep, it's Linux so you just have to enable the telnet daemon and off you go (click here for the details of how to do this).

And if all of that isn't enough, LinkSys just sent us a wireless Compact Flash card the day after Zaurus arrived. This is one of a number of 802.11b devices for which Zaurus has built-in drivers.

So, we plugged in the LinkSys card, configured the network interface and, voilą! There we were, walking around the office, Zaurus in hand, browsing the Web and checking e-mail. We managed to get the Zaurus e-mail client working with the Ipswitch IMail server we just installed and about which we intend to write in a future dispatch, using POP3 but not Internet Message Access Protocol 4 (we have yet to figure out why this isn't working because Outlook can access the IMAP server just fine). We could also use VNC and telnet over the wireless link! Cool.

The only problem with this setup was that the LinkSys Compact Flash card is a couple of millimeters too wide, which prevents you from taking out or putting back the Zaurus' pen from its slot in the top of the case. We could live with that though.

There are all sorts of cool tools and applications for the Zaurus SL-5500. At ZaurusZone, you'll find links to toys such as Bluetooth support, wireless tools, a version of nMap (a powerful network exploration tool), the Apache Web server, a caching proxy server for fetching and offline reading of Web pages, MySQL server and client, Samba (so that you can create network shares ą la Microsoft networking) and dozens more way cool tools.

Developer support for the Zaurus is great.

This is one of the coolest toys, er, tools we've played with, er, evaluated for some time. We award the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 10 gearteeth out of 10! We wonder if they'll forget we have it?

Personal digital assistance to gearhead@gibbs.com.

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