Tomoharu Nishino has written in with a translation for one of yesterday’s news items:

You mentioned the new Japanese Zaurus PDA, but lamented the lack of details owing to the language barrier. Well, if you are interested, here are the basic specs from their Web page.

Proprietary Zaurus OS and PIM, 32bit RISC processor, 8MB Flash/8MB RAM 240*320 frontlit 16bit color display, slide out keyboard and HWR, MPEG-4 movie player, MP3 player, built in support for connection to cellular phone/modems, POP3/SMTP mail client, browser with HTML3.2, 128bit SSL, Javascript, frames and cookie support, and compact flash and SD card slot.

According to the Web page, Sharp has included both CF and SD card slots so that the SD card slot can be occupied by a memory card, while the CF card is occupied by some other device (modem, camera, etc.).

An interesting capability is MPEG-4 playback. As a separate accessory Sharp provides an MPEG-4 encoder which plugs into a standard video connection. With a big enough memory card, you could conceivably carry a feature length movie around.

I have used the Japanese Zaurus OS and PIM and find it clumsy to use, but Sharp sure knows how to make hardware.

Hope this was interesting.