There have been several rumors of Sharp discontinuing its Zaurus PDA line in Europe. The company apparently plans to further study the market potential for its Zaurus PDAs in Europe before commiting to future Zaurus marketing efforts there. The following is an excerpt from an announcement by Sharp, published on its German website and translated via Babelfish . . .

Sharp terminates the selling of the Zaurus in Germany

“With the running out of the model Zaurus Sl-5500g in Germany Sharp terminates for the time being the selling of Linux PDAs on the German market. Sharp concentrates in the near future on the advancement of the Zaurus line for the Japanese market. There the successful concept with the recently presented models Sl-c750 and Sl-c760 is continued.”

“The service achievements for Zaurus customers are of this decision not concerned and also the telephone Hotline 01805 23 46 75 for users are available further in its entirety. To the information of the large Zaurus Fangemeinde the Zaurus.de portals www.zaurus.de, business.zaurus.de and developer.zaurus.de is resumed. The discussion forums however are closed up to further.”

“Sharp will further intensively observe the European market and is as a technologically leading manufacturer at any time in the situation to react with new developments to a positive development of the paragraph situation . . .”

Read full story

Several postings on Sharp's Zaurus DevNet developer website shed further (unofficial) light on the situation. For example: “I have just received a mail from the Zaurus product manager of Sharp Germany in which he regrets to inform us that the Zaurus history comes to an end in Germany (and Europe as he told me in private). This also includes support and PR activites for the device. New devices will make their way to Japan only and maybe the US . . .”

Additional perspective is provided by an article published in The Register . . .

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.