Sharp adds hard disk to its Linux PDA

IDG News Service - Sharp Corp. has added a hard disk drive to its latest Zaurus PDA, and is considering selling the Linux-based device abroad, the company said Friday.

The SL-C3000 PDA contains a 4GB hard disk drive made by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc. This capacity is about 30 times bigger than the storage in Sharp's previous PDA model, the SL-C860, which had 128MB of flash memory, according to the company.

"We wanted to put in a hard disk before, but they were too big and too heavy," said Hirohide Nakagawa, group general manager of Sharp's information and communication systems business group, Friday at a news conference in Tokyo.

The new model, which is 124mm wide, 87mm long and 25mm thick, contains a 416-MHz XScale processor by Intel Corp., which is marginally faster than the 400-MHz version used by the SL-C860.

It has 16MB of flash memory, 64MB of synchronous dynamic RAM and a 3.7-in. VGA (640 by 480 pixels) screen, which swivels and folds onto the body of the device.

With its built-in QWERTY thumb keyboard, the 298-gram SL-C3000 is designed to meet just about any personal and business use, Nakagawa said.

It is Windows Media Audio compatible and plays MPEG-2 video. Armed with a Lineo uLinux operating system from Lineo Solutions Inc., the PDA can act as an external hard drive. Users can drag and drop Microsoft Office software, such as Word and Excel files, and JPEG, BMP, GIF and PNG image formats.

It can store about 700 songs on the MP3 format, or about 50,000 50KB Word or Excel files, Nakagawa said.

The new Zaurus is also designed to work with a wide range of devices. Along with an Secure Digital memory card slot, USB and irDA infrared ports, it also has a CompactFlash card slot.

The latter slot can be used with various types of wireless communications cards such as those for Wireless LAN, Wideband Code Division Multiple Access cellular, and with the Personal Handyphone System that is commonly used for data communications in Japan.

"Our key concepts are communication, contents and computing," said Nakagawa.

Prior Zaurus models were Java-enabled, but Sharp decided not to add Java to the new model, said Takeoki Asahi, manager of the company's mobile communications product division.

"We did a survey, and the majority of respondents said they didn't use Java," he said at the news conference.

While the company has not set plans for selling a version of the model outside Japan, it is considering the option, Nakagawa said. At the moment, Sharpplans to produce about 15,000 of the models each month.

New versions might also have digital terrestrial TV tuners, and/or digital satellite broadcasting tuners, he said.

The SL-C3000 will be on sale in Japan on Nov. 10 for about $730.

Reprinted with permission from

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