November 6, 2001
The Sharp SL-5000D is a PDA with a difference; it is the first PDA from a major power in consumer electronics to ship with the Linux operating system.
(The Sharp SL-5000D will be on display at Comdex in the Trolltech booth, #L 7846)
"Sharp believes that consumers are just waiting for the kind of power and flexibility this operating environment brings to palmtop computing," said Steve Petix, Sharp's associate vice president, Mobile & IT Solutions Group. "We've worked hard on two things that will ensure the success of the Zaurus: the power and reliability of the hardware platform; and the richness of the application environment."
Starting today, Sharp is accepting pre-orders from the developer community for the SL-5000D developer unit. The SL-5000D uses the Embedix Plus PDA solution, which contains: Lineo's Embedix(TM) Linux; Trolltech's Qt/Embedded(TM) and Qt AWT GUI technologies; Insignia Solution's Jeode PDA Edition(TM); and Opera Software's embedded web browser. Running on top of Embedix Plus is Trolltech's Qt Palmtop, an application environment based on Qt that provides a full range of applications for business productivity, handheld games, personal information management, and synchronization across multiple desktops.
"The SL-5000D shows that when you combine slick hardware with a cool application environment, you end up with a product that pushes the limits of what a PDA can do," said Haavard Nord, Trolltech's CEO. "It is also another demonstration of an important point: Linux is a mainstream operating system. It brings the same kind of value to PDAs that it has already brought to the server market."
Trolltech was chosen to provide the user interface for four reasons:
1. Community support: There are currently tens of thousands of developers familiar with Qt, the development tool used to build Qt Palmtop;
2. Thousands of existing applications: Given the cross-platform nature of Trolltech's development tools, many applications can be easily ported to Sharp's device;
3. Speed and efficiency: Qt Palmtop possesses a small memory footprint, yet provides desktop-like functionality; 4. Java Support: Insignia's Jeode and Trolltech's Qt AWT will support all Java-PersonalJava based applications. The combination of these two pieces of software allows Java applications to have a native look and feel, while providing efficient memory usage.
For more information on Sharp's developer program, please visit http://developer.sharpsec.com.
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