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IBM, Sharp To Cooperate On Linux-based PDAsBy Bernard Cole
The handheld, aimed at corporate clients, will be launched in the middle of next year and will be based on Sharp's Zaurus, which went on sale earlier this year and runs on that company's own implementation of Linux.
The Zaurus has so far failed to catch on with consumers in a market dominated by handhelds running operating systems from Palm Inc. and Microsoft Corp., despite an agressive product introduction effort by Sharp, including the introduction
this month of the Zarus SL-5600PDA with a a new memory architecture
offering corporate users 64 MB of protected flash memory, plus 32 MB of SDRAM.
Software and data stored in Flash memory will not be lost even when the unit's battery runs out.
However, the combination of Sharp's expertise in the consumer market and IBM's penetration of the corporate market could give the architecture a leg up in the professional segment, blunting Microsoft's efforts in both segments.
The Zaurus SL-5600 has a QVGA LCD screen, integrated QWERTY thumb keyboard with sliding cover, rechargeable, replaceable batteries, Compact Flash and SD/MMC expansion card slots, as well as integrated speaker and microphone.
It runs on the Intel XScale 400 MHz processor. The unit comes with an Insignia Solutions Jeode Java Virtual Machine to run Java applications, and it synchronizes with Microsoft Outlook on the PC.
The new Enterprise Edition Zaurus the two companies are working on for next year will allow workers to to wirelessly access corporate databases, check inventories and order supplies, the companies said. It will connect to IBM's
WebSphere business software package and its DB2 database program.
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