12 Facts About Sharp Zaurus

Sharp Zaurus is the name of a series of personal digital assistants made by Sharp Corporation.

The Sharp Zaurus was the most popular PDA during the 1990s in Japan and was based on a proprietary operating system.

In September 1993, Sharp introduced the PI-3000, the first in the Zaurus line of PDAs, as a follow-on to Sharp's earlier Wizard line of PDAs .

The Sharp Zaurus K-PDA was the first Sharp Zaurus to have a built-in keyboard in addition to handwriting recognition; the PI-6000 and PI-7000 brought in additional improvements.

Later that year, Sharp Zaurus developed a forty-inch TFT LCD screen, the world's largest at the time.

Related searches

Sharp continued to make advancements in display technology; the Zaurus gained additional multimedia capabilities, such as video playback, with the introduction of the MI-E1 in Japan in November 2000.

Sharp Zaurus has continued development of the SL series in Japan releasing the SL-C700, C750, C760 and C860 models which all feature 640x480 VGA screen resolution.

In October 2004 Sharp Zaurus announced the SL-C3000 - the world's first PDA with an integrated hard disk drive .

In June 2005, Sharp Zaurus released the SL-C3100, which had flash capacity of the C1000 yet had the micro-drive, and proved a very popular model indeed.

Since there is no official export channel from Japan, Sharp Zaurus offers no warranty or repair service outside Japan, so foreign buyers are dependent on their chosen reseller to handle repairs, usually by sending to their agent in Japan who acts as if the device was owned and used in Japan in order to have it repaired by Sharp Zaurus, before sending it back to the owner.

In January 2007, it was reported that Sharp would discontinue production of the Zaurus line after February 2007.

Software provided by Sharp Zaurus includes basic PDA packages such as a datebook, addressbook, and to do list.