The Zaurus SL-B500 is coming to the US as the SL-5600. It offers a few improvements over the current SL-5500: 400MHz XScale, mono speaker and microphone, 1700mAh battery, Flash jumps to 64MB and is user-accessible, RAM is reduced to 32MB.
The RAM reduction sounds bad but in terms of usable memory there is no change for users of stock Sharp ROMs. The SL-5500 devotes half of it’s RAM to storage, leaving 32MB for running applications, and the 16MB of Flash is not usable. Rebooting an SL-5500 will cause it to lose everything stored in RAM. The SL-5600 offers roughly the same amount of usable RAM and storage space, and moving storage to Flash protects it from reboots.
What disappoints me about the SL-5600 is that Sharp hasn’t done enough to improve the keyboard. Distance between the bottom row of keys and the upper lip of the slide is improved, but that’s about it. IMO, the keyboard needs illumination and an Fn key should be added to the right side. And something needs to be done about entering numbers, either a dedicated row of numeric keys or a keypad-style layout used with the Fn key (like many laptop keyboards).
