Sharp Zaurus

» see sharp.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i missed the zaurus. by 2003 i was a cs undergrad in ankara with a ttnet dsl line at home and an internet cafe csgo habit on the side. the linux pdas i read about on slashdot were sl-5500s sitting in someone's pocket in california or tokyo. they were never on the shelf in turkey at any price i could justify, and by the time the sl-c1000 clamshells appeared in 2004 they were already japan-only.

but the idea of the zaurus was loud in the linux world for years. a real shell with gcc and ssh built in, running embedix linux under trolltech's qtopia, on an intel xscale at 400 mhz under a clamshell keyboard. you could install python or apache if you wanted to. people did, just to prove it could be done.

sharp killed the line in december 2008. by then the iphone had been out for a year and a half, and the developer audience that would have bought a zaurus was already moving to jailbroken iphones or to nokia n8x0 internet tablets. there was no announced successor and no transition path. the zaurus just stopped.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the linux pda fantasy ~

the zaurus was the closest the 2000s ever got to the pocketable unix machine the linux scene wanted. you could write a shell script on the device or compile your own kernel for it. the community openzaurus rom went further and gave you a deb-based system. the official sharp roms were also fine, but the community ones felt like running real linux in a hand.

that audience was always small. most of the sl-c series after 2004 stayed in japan because sharp could not justify shipping english-marketed clamshells against the windows mobile flood. people in europe imported them through dynamism.com and a couple of other gray-market sites. they came with japanese keyboards and a vague warranty.

~ how it ended ~

the iphone shipped in 2007 and the android sdk landed in late 2007 too. by 2008 the entire concept of the standalone pda was obsolete. nokia tried to keep linux-pda-style devices going with the n810 and later n900, but those leaned on internet tablet branding rather than the pim-anchored pda category. sharp announced the end of the zaurus in december 2008 with no replacement.

the openzaurus community wound down a few years later. its work fed openembedded and yocto, which still ship as the embedded linux build system for industrial devices in 2026. so the software lineage survived. the hardware did not.

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