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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Monday, March 25, 2002In response to my comment on the Zaurus upgrade procedure, Josh wrote:
Maybe a silly question, but who cares about the awkwardness of ROM updates? What percentage of consumers are going to do a ROM upgrade? [...] I have big hands and can still push those 2 front buttons just fine.
The procedure is awkward and requires hardware that doesn't come in the box. That CF cards are readily available and inexpensive does not excuse this. The ROM upgrade procedures for Palm and Pocket PC devices do not require memory cards, nor do they require funky button presses front and back.
I'm hopeful that lots of customers will need to upgrade the ROM on their SL-5500s. I just upgraded to the "release" image on my SL-5000D, and I still find the bundled apps to be lacking. If I were intending to use the device for "classic" PDA purposes, it would have already found it's way into my junk drawer.
If Sharp only intends to target hard-core Linux geeks, fine. If they want to snipe sales from Palm and Pocket PC, they have a long way to go. The keyboard is a neat trick, but the consumer market has always demanded quality apps in the box.
Today I thought it would be interesting to compare the multimedia support of the Sharp Zaurus SL-5000D and Audiovox Maestro. If you haven't been keeping up, the SL-5000D is the developer version of the SL-5500, a consumer-oriented PDA that runs Linux. The Maestro is the cheapest Pocket PC 2002 device presently available.
On the Maestro, Microsoft offers the familiar "Windows Media Player." It plays the usual MS audio and video files, plus MP3. It does not play mpeg files. The interface is the same regardless of media type, at the bottom are the expect buttons for Play/Pause, Stop, Previous, and Next, along with sliders for Position and Volume.
On the Zaurus, there is an application called "Media Player." So far as I could tell it only plays MP3 and mpeg video, none of the MS formats are supported. When you start the app, it presents tabbed interface with "Video", "Music", and "Playlist." On each tab you are presented with all the files of that type that exist on the device and any storage cards. Playing a file opens a new window. For audio files, a "thumb-able" interface is presented with the typical buttons, however, there is no ability to move forward or backward within a song. For video files, there is no interface at all, just a window with video playing in it.
Playing 192Kbps MP3s, I could not distinguish between the two PDAs. Sound quality through the headphones is excellent. The Zaurus scores a few extra points for having an interface designed to be used with a thumb, and loses a few points for not being able to skip around within a track.
For video testing, I downloaded a 16MB mpeg of Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice" and used Windows Movie Maker to convert it to a 768Kbps WMV file (19MB). Again, the Zaurus loses points for the interface, as it literally doesn't have one! It also loses points because the video was very muddy compared to the Maestro, I suspect that WMP is adjusting the colors to compensate for the LCD. The Zaurus did, however, play the video at a fairly smooth frame rate. The Maestro was dropping frames like crazy.
Conclusion: PDAs suck for video, get a portable DVD or VCD player instead. On the audio front, both have excellent quality but their interfaces are lacking. I'd rather have an iPod, or even a Nomad Jukebox.
PS: WMP is skinnable, so there may be skins available with a better interface for MP3 playing.
LSSU's Banished Words 2002Last night I went to Muvico to see "Blade II." My roommate had a theory that the theater was using WiFi to connect their outside kioks, and I wanted to find out, so the Zaurus came with me. For extra fun I decided to let Kismet run from my apartment all the way to the theater.
First it sniffed my own network, and lost it from about three steps outside the front door. Very good. Driving out of the apartment complex, we picked up the same open Linksys from last time. We found another Linksys while stopped at a red light in a residential area. At the theater we picked up nothing. For the sake of curiousity, I wandered around a bit with the Zaurus running in my back pocket. Nada.
So I shut the thing off and watched the movie. Roger Ebert said good things about the movie, and I agree...
Turned the sniffer back up on my way out, got nothing on the way home. I was suspicious of the result because the LED on my WiFi card kept flashing. I had my roommate try some things (typing and driving is quite challenging "smile"), including a reboot, but nothing changed. As soon as we were home and I associated with our access point, it went into promiscuous mode without a hitch.
Something to dig into...
