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Sharp Zaurus

Yep. Mines been plugged in all day, no battery, still will not boot. Will order a replacement battery once I'm able.
 
Ahh, I used to have a Zaurus, bought it when they first came out. I must have owned about a dozen pocket PC/PDAs throughout the 1990s, my mate and I were regularly buying the latest & greatest ones, ha !
My first one being the Casio Cassiopia, but that one was a bit disappointing actually, the screen was crap.
 
I have two 5600, a cradle and a wifi card somwhere around here. I used to use mine a s mp3 player with a 2GB microdrive for storage...unfortunately, I killed it in an ill advised attempt at using it as virtual memory on my ancient compaq laptop. I remember trying to build my own Opie images with early versions of OpenEmbedded back in the day. I think I even worked with Richard Purdie on some 2.6 kernel stuff, including a way to use a small kernel in flash to boot a larger one. I should see if I can get them working again.
 
I just found on on my Zaurus SL-5500: nearly all third party batteries you can buy are mechanically not really matching the contacts. For whatever reason all the same.
One should think this should be the easy task to copy a battery ;-)
So, take a sharp knife and have a close look to the original battery, if you still have it. I needed to cut approx 1 mm in one direction.
And now- finally - after purchasing three different batteries ( I was toooooo blind to see) it is now working.
yippeee
good luck für your Zaurus
 
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@jack_hh - thank you VERY much for that tip, I had assumed the replacement battery was the same (it said it was....) but you're right, the ports don't line up with the connections, and are quite different to my old battery.

I did some very careful trimming of the plastic to expand/expose the conenctions a bit more and my SL 5500 fired up for the first time in years - awesome to see.

I'm now looking around for my old CF cards and hoping to get OpenZaurus + Opie back on - are there any archives/ftps still around for things like that? Getting loads of 404s so far.

Thanks again for the help, happy days!
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Anybody remember these?

Image
Image


In a sense this is the predecessor to all your android smartphones.

I got this for my high school graduation in 2003. I don't recall what happened to it back then but I never got the use out of it that I wanted. I'm really happy I found it again and that the battery hadn't leaked and destroyed it. I even had a compatible battery from another device I'm rehabbing.

Now if I could only remember how to turn it on...
Click to expand...
When these devices were on the shelf, I visited the PDA section at a local Fry's to play with it. Unlike the other retail areas, the PDA section looked like a thrift store. I had read about the device in tech magazines and, so, I was considering an investment. As a linux user, the appeal was the OS. After about five minutes with the thing, I decided to upgrade from a 1st gen Palm to the Tungsten T5 (huge upgrade). It didn't make sense to switch after some years on the palm platform. It also seemed to be nearing the end of the PDA industry. I had a friend at the time who worked at Palm and gave me some NDA info about their development goals. And yes, I was an eager owner of a Palm Pre many years later.

A few Zaurus considerations:

Janky Screen
Very little developer support (apps, games, appliances)
Sucky battery life

Believe it or not, I still use the palm today. Though, the battery has been replaced. The sdcard houses palm linux, so, I have two OS's to choose from.

I am, though, considering a purchase of a Palm T/X. Unlike the T5, it has integrated wifi. This would give me online access on the linux side.
 
I have in my collection a palm-sized laptop that runs full windows 10 OS, I still yearn for the old palmtop/PDA style devices. They just had a specialness to them that modern smartphones don't even approach.

When the flashlight app on your smartphone contains in-app purchases, its tough to love the modern world.
 
Seconding what @DonZaurus said - Kudos @jack_hh for this observation on the replacement batteries. I'd just received my second 3rd party battery replacement and found it odd that two in a row didnt work so I did a search and found this post. Trimming the plastic around the contacts indeed fixed the issue and am able to charge the Zaurus SL-5500 once again
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Oof thats worrisome. Especially since I found some advertised as being compatible!
Click to expand...

Just because a battery is compatible doesn't mean it will fit like the OEM product...

Not making any contact with the battery terminals is wild, but being a little loose or too tight is a common problem with third party replacement batteries.
 
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