Sharp Puts Linux in Its Handheld

HANOVER, GERMANY -- Sharp offered a peek of things to come in the market for personal digital assistants on Wednesday. The company unveiled its sleek new Zaurus MI-E1 PDA at the CeBIT trade show here.

Already available in Japan, the PDA includes a 3.5 inch color LCD, miniature keyboard, digital music player, and digital video player that couples with a companion digital video recorder.

But when the device finally becomes available in the United States later this year, it will sport one important difference: it will run on the Linux operating system. Japanese versions of the Zaurus are based on Sharp's proprietary operating system.

Sharp is still developing the Linux version, and plans to release it in North America and Europe sometime in the fourth quarter of this year.

The European and North American retail prices have not been decided yet although Harald Rätzer, a spokesperson for Sharp, says it will likely retail in Germany for between $465 and $697. In Japan the Zaurus MI-E1 currently retails for $408.

Sharp has an approximate 50 percent share of the Japanese PDA market and the launch of the new Zaurus in Europe and North America will mark the beginning of a major push by the company to secure a slice of the overseas market, which is dominated by Palm and Handspring, as well as a selection of machines based on Microsoft's Pocket PC and Windows CE operating systems.

Earlier this week Sharp said it was considering support for Sun's Java programming language in future versions of the Zaurus.