Thread: Abiword, Gnumeric for ITOS 2006
View Single Post
Jerome is offline Jerome
2006-08-01 , 20:24
Posts: 477 | Thanked: 118 times | Joined on Dec 2005 @ Munich, Germany
#22
Originally Posted by fpp
The Zaurus is clearly an accidental OSS hacker target : Sharp designed it as a closed platform, tailored for the japanese domestic market. They never sold it abroad, or claimed it was good for anything else than its intended use (a glorified dictionary, basically). The fact that hackers jumped through hoops to lay their hands on one because it was the first Linux PDA, and a good one, is incidental, and its shortcomings in this regard perceived by said hackers cannot be blamed on Sharp. Mostly.

I'd like to correct that, because the story of the Zaurus sheds and interesting light on the 770. The original, pda style zaurus was sold in the US and in Germany (I have one with a german keyboard) to the general public. The later, clamshell, mini-laptop style Zaurus were indeed only sold in Japan as a glorified dictionary, but another version, also pda-style, was sold in the US, mainly as a device to run java corporate applications.

The interesting part of the story is that Sharp tried to sell their device to the general public, but apparently did not sell enough of it. It seems that they had lots of problems supporting what they sold it for: a pda that would synchronize to a windows platform.