The successor to the Sharp Zaurus SL-C3200

I had a Sharp Zaurus SL-C3200. This was before tablets. Smartphones were still primitive, and people still used Palm Pilots. I remember when color displays in PDA’s were a big thing.

But then smartphones came along and PDA’s were all but forgotten.

The Sharp Zaurus SL-C3200 was really cool. But it was also a PITA. It required a cludgy CF card to be inserted in its side for Wifi. The card I had only supported 802.11b. Even worse, there was no really good, stable OS for it. The original OS was not good. OpenZaurus came along and was ok but not too stable. Cacko Linux seemed to be the best but was no longer being developed and had become very crusty. It simply required too much overhead and annoyance to use a Zaurus SL-C3200.

It turns out that Sharp actually released a successor to the SL-C3200, a device called the NetWalker PC-Z1. This looks really cool. Had I known about this at the time there’s a high likelihood that I would have gotten it. As it turns out, I only found out about it a couple weeks ago.

Image from endgadget.com article Sharp’s 5-inch PC-Z1 NetWalker honors Zaurus legacy with touchscreen Ubuntu

Here’s an article with even more cool photos of it.

Here’s a whole page including flash video of it at sharp.co.jp