Questions on the SL-C3000 (or C860)

[informer]

Hi,

I have been looking for a PDA to replace my broken Clie, I have an opportunity to buy the latest Sharp SLC3000 or the C860.  I'm more interested in the SLC3000 because of the greater storage capacity and the included dictionaries (I'm in Japan).

My questions are :

1. Can I copy my 640x480 videos (around 170mb in size) and play them on the SLC3000?  I enjoy watching animes (Naruto), would be fun to watch them on the PDA.

2. I really want to use this PDA especially for learning Japanese, is the SLC3000 good/responsive enough to be an electronic dictionary?  I assume it can playback words in Japanese/English?

3. I suppose playing MP3s should be no problem right?  What about WAV, WMA and AAC?  I prefer to playback WAV so the 3++ GB of storage will come in handy.  Can it record audio?

4. Is there an equivalent BEJEWEL (my all time favourite game on the Clie) on the Sharp?  How are games on the Sharp anyway?  

5. How does it view MS Office documents?  Any problems?

6. Does the Sharp come with a photo manager software to manage a collection of pictures?

7.  What is the main difference between the SLC3000 and the C860 in terms of the OS and pre-installed software?  The SLC3000 is about 30,000 yen (280 USD) more expensive than the C860.  Surely that difference can't be because of the 4GB extra storage can it?

I used to own a Sharp handheld PC from years back, tried desperately to revive it but it was way too old (could barely play MP3s).  Now, I'm going to try again with this one if I can get the above questions answered.  

I've been considering everything from buying a micro notebook from Sony, PPC or another Clie.  Was even thinking about the Sony PSP (heard that it will allow developers to develop PIM type software for it).  Started looking at the Zarus today as well as reading everything I could find on the new SLC3000, I was hooked.  Seems like what I needed to compliment my fat notebook (which I do not wish to carry around anymore).

Anyway, hope you can help!

Yoroshiku Onegai Shimasu!!!

[Stubear]

My questions are :

1. Can I copy my 640x480 videos (around 170mb in size) and play them on the SLC3000?  I enjoy watching animes (Naruto), would be fun to watch them on the PDA.

That will depend on the foramt of your vidoes, the standard movie player that comes with the C860 only plays mpeg4 encoded movies at 320x240 at 15 fps. Mplayer can paly just about anything, but you may need to resize them.

2. I really want to use this PDA especially for learning Japanese, is the SLC3000 good/responsive enough to be an electronic dictionary?  I assume it can playback words in Japanese/English?

No one knows how responsive the C3k will be as only a few have had the chance to hold one. But the dictionaries on the C860 run fine and the translations are quite good. THe C3k offers multimedia additions to the dictionaries - which seems to mean form the advertising I've seen in Osaka that it includes pictures and pronunciation, but as it is aimed at the Nihonjin market I wouldn't be surprised if it only had English pronunciation.

3. I suppose playing MP3s should be no problem right?  What about WAV, WMA and AAC?  I prefer to playback WAV so the 3++ GB of storage will come in handy.  Can it record audio?

Yes you can record but only in mono, the media player that comes standard lays mp3 and wav, haven't seen anything about AAC but the movie player supports wma

4. Is there an equivalent BEJEWEL (my all time favourite game on the Clie) on the Sharp?  How are games on the Sharp anyway? 

5. How does it view MS Office documents?  Any problems?

Hancomword does a decent job of opening word docs, but complex docs with lots of tables etc confuse it.

6. Does the Sharp come with a photo manager software to manage a collection of pictures?

Nope

7.  What is the main difference between the SLC3000 and the C860 in terms of the OS and pre-installed software?  The SLC3000 is about 30,000 yen (280 USD) more expensive than the C860.  Surely that difference can't be because of the 4GB extra storage can it?

The main difference is 4GB storage, multimedia additinos to dictionary, reports have said that the kernel is version 2.4.20 instead of 2.4.18. I doubt the qtopia version will be any higher.

The "official" price of the C3k is only 10,000 yen more expensive than C860 (79,800 vs 69,800) the C860 has been around a lot longer so you can find it for much cheaper. Give the C3k a couple of months and you'll be able to get it in Akihabara for around 60,000 yen.

Stu

[informer]

Hi thanks Stu!

I found this link related to the available software for the Zarus, I'm assuming they would work on the SLC3000 :

http://www.killefiz.de/zaurus/

My anime videos are running at 640x480, encoded with the DivX codecs.  Don't mind if they don't play in full screen, can they be played to an external source like a monitor or TV via a composite or s-video cable?

I'm aware that the SLC3000 is designed for the locals here, hence the added dictionaries .  I'm just not sure if I can use these dictionaries to learn and test my Japanese like an electronic dictionary (or are they more suited for Japanese learning English?).  I think someone has already answered this, though no one has confirmed it with fact on how these dictionaries work yet.

I haven't played with the PDA myself (only the C860), I'll be going to Akihabara tomorrow to check it out.

BTW C860 can be had for 49,000 yen now.

[Stubear]

A lot of the apps (but not all) form ZSI (http://www.killefiz.de/zaurus/) will work on the C860 and most probably the C3k, however a lot of them were designed for the SL5k series and are therefore 320x240 screen sized. Some of them resize properly for the 640x480 screen but not all.

Some of the apps are for opie and won't run on the sharp rom - most can/will though.

From my experiences with the C760 and C860 dictionarioes, if you can read aknji then they will be of use to you. If your kanji skills are lacking then you will need to cut/paste stuff to get the readings.

I suggest you download zten and the edict dictionary - See here for links to halx's versions (thanks halx )

Kanjinirvan is also another app that you may find useful on the zaurus

Stu

[tumnus]

4. Is there an equivalent BEJEWEL (my all time favourite game on the Clie) on the Sharp?

Yes. It's called Mighty Charms and can be found here: http://www.myzaurus.com

How are games on the Sharp anyway?

Some are excellent. Check out the ZSI. EON Games has ported some very high quality games, however since these are from the Pocket PC, they are all in portrait mode and none of Sharp's clamshells have a d-pad in portrait mode for controlling most of these apps.

5. How does it view MS Office documents?  Any problems?

Viewing is generally fine with the Hancom suite, which I think the SL-3000 should come with. Hancom Sheet is also generally ok for editing basic spreadsheets. For editing Word docs however you might want to check out Textmaker for Zaurus (A very feature full word processor): http://www.softmaker.com

[informer]

Just visited Akihabara, the SLC3000 will come out on the 10th of November, and will cost at around 80,000 yen.  I was not able to see it though, instead played with the C860 instead.  I really need to convert it to English if I am to use it on a daily basis.

[Stubear]

Just visited Akihabara, the SLC3000 will come out on the 10th of November, and will cost at around 80,000 yen.  I was not able to see it though, instead played with the C860 instead.  I really need to convert it to English if I am to use it on a daily basis.

You have 2 options here:

1) Flash an English only rom such as Cako, pdaX or Opie/OZ

2) Convert the menus etc to English but keep all Japanese input/reading ability.

I chose 2 and wrote a script to do the conversion. I've posted it many times on this forum (although some people have recently contacted me saying that copy-pasting from the web breaks the script) and it is available here

Let me know if you have any problems with the script.

Stu

[informer]

Thanks Stu, will keep you up to date.  I think its pretty much confirmed that I'll get it.

One quick question, do Zaurus connect though 2.0 or 1.1?  There's no mention of it anywhere.

[ashikase]

USB 1.1. The C860 uses a serial-to-usb cable to connect to a PC, while the c3000 uses a usb cable.

- ashikase
  anpachi, gifu, japan

[informer]

USB 1.1. The C860 uses a serial-to-usb cable to connect to a PC, while the c3000 uses a usb cable.

- ashikase
  anpachi, gifu, japan

USB 1.1???

Isn't that going to be extremely slow especially on the 4gb SLC3000?

[webslngr]

USB 1.1???

Isn't that going to be extremely slow especially on the 4gb SLC3000?

Yesterday, I finally got around to playing with the usbdrive functionality with my Z. I have a 4gb microdrive for my 860 and I copyied 1.86gb of Flame of Recca manga (the 860 is GREAT for reading manga in portrait) to the 860 via the usb storage function from my win2k pro workstation.  The process took 48 minutes to copy the manga to my zaurus using robocopy.  It's not the fastest thing on the planet, but it gets the job done.  There are several other methods of transferring data to and from the Z, you might want to take a look at them.

--webslngr

[informer]

USB 1.1???

Isn't that going to be extremely slow especially on the 4gb SLC3000?

Yesterday, I finally got around to playing with the usbdrive functionality with my Z. I have a 4gb microdrive for my 860 and I copyied 1.86gb of Flame of Recca manga (the 860 is GREAT for reading manga in portrait) to the 860 via the usb storage function from my win2k pro workstation.  The process took 48 minutes to copy the manga to my zaurus using robocopy.  It's not the fastest thing on the planet, but it gets the job done.  There are several other methods of transferring data to and from the Z, you might want to take a look at them.

--webslngr

48 minutes???

How about WIFI?  that should be faster than USB 1.1.

[informer]

You have 2 options here:

1) Flash an English only rom such as Cako, pdaX or Opie/OZ

2) Convert the menus etc to English but keep all Japanese input/reading ability.

I chose 2 and wrote a script to do the conversion. I've posted it many times on this forum (although some people have recently contacted me saying that copy-pasting from the web breaks the script) and it is available here

Let me know if you have any problems with the script.

Stu

Hi Stu,

Thanks for the tip!

I think I will go with number 2 first and try doing the conversion myself.  I've done some programming and script writing in DOS before so I think with a bit of reading it should be a nice challenge  

BTW, where are you located? EDITED : ok Osaka!  Just saw your profile!!

[Stubear]

Update on number 2.

You may want to try changing your locale to zh_TW (in /home/zaurus/Settings/locale.conf).

Miami_Bob has found that to the best for him on the C860 (more on this over at this thread

It's faster and much easier to reverse if you aren't happy with the results.

Stu

[ZeeUser]

Informer:
Dynamism says the C3000 supports USB 2.0 transfers:
"And, since the Zaurus's HDD is plug-n-play recognized by Windows, moving data is by USB 2.0 connection is fast and easy."
I do not know where they get their info, so I would not take it as fact until it is confirmed by others