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Handhelds Java Operating Systems Programming Software Hardware

Psion Is Back :-), With Windows :-( 179

Posted by timothy from the perhaps-familiar-will-run dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Forbes has an article about the come back of Psion in the high end PDA market. Psion's OS, Symbian, that used to power their PDA (as the Revo for example, or the Series 3, or the Series 5), has been mostly used in cell phones lately, like the Nokia 3650. According to Forbes's article, the new Psion laptop/PDA, the Netbook Pro, will not be powered by Symbian OS, but by Microsoft CE.Net." prostoalex points out a ZDNet review of the device, "which is smaller than your usual notebook PC, but larger than a regular PDA. The product Web site contains specifications in PDF format. It's an Intel Xscale PXA255 400MHz, 128MB SDRAM and 32MB Flash, SVGA (800x600) device supporting CompactFlash and Secure Digital (usual for PDAs) as well as PCMCIA (usual for laptops)," and notes that despite the OS, "the specs list the presence of JEM-CE Java Virtual Machine."
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Psion Is Back :-), With Windows :-( More

Psion Is Back :-), With Windows :-(

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  • Linux user gets laid... :-) off :-(. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

  • Quick! (Score:2, Funny)

    by SkArcher ( 676201 )
    This PDA needs an OS transplant!
    • A number of Psion users agree with you and have created an online petition [petitiononline.com] to have the Symbian/EPOC (not Sybian you perverts!) OS as an option (as used in Psion's previous NetBook, 5/5Mx and Revo/Mako).

      A NetBook Pro [pdastreet.com] forum has been set up at PDAStreet/Psionplace to discuss this - with plenty of posters bemoaning the lack of EPOC.

  • Please Cease and Desist Use of :-( (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 04, 2003 @06:27PM (#7134498)
    As you may be aware, ":-(" is the registered trademarked property of Despair, Inc [despair.com]. It has come to our attention that Slashdot's use of this trademark was unlicensed, and thus it must be removed. If our trademarked :-( is removed immediately, it will not be necessary for us to file charges . Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

  • this is not IRC (Score:5, Funny)

    by arcanumas ( 646807 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @06:27PM (#7134499) Homepage
    The Day Slashdot uses "LOL" in a story, i stop reading it...
    I'me afraid it's close..
    • I dunno, I think the emoticons are worse than an abbreviation like LOL.
    • and the day that a comment get's posted without a spelling or gramatical error is the day I stop reading, as well!

      By the way, what is IRC? Some of us are over 30 ya' know.

      • Ironically, those over 30 might recognize that IRC is Internet Relay Chat, a chat network and system set up waaaay before the world wide web ever was, dating back to when usenet didn't have spam, and the glory days of gopher.

        Ah well. May as well join into modern convention.

        LOLOLOL ROTFL U R 2 K00L K BYE.

  • Good. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rolken ( 703064 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @06:28PM (#7134501)
    With something that close to a PC, I'd rather be using Windows anyway. There's no point in creating compatibility issues for myself just to be able to say I screwed Microsoft. With cell phones syncing isn't an issue, so go ahead and have that market.
    • Especially when I can get a full featured laptop for $1600 with a widescreen display and a CD-RW/DVD and a 900MHz Pentium M ULV, and it only weighs a pound more (OK, so it's only a 10.4" widescreen...) So, in the new /. phrasing:

      Full-featured 3.4lb laptop with a widescreen :-), that's 10.4" :-(
    • Windows CE isn't compatible with Windows, so compatibility is moot. You wouldn't have any more of a compatibility issue with Symbian/EPOC than you would with Palm OS or Win CE.

  • MUST /. be so biased? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Kedisar ( 705040 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @06:28PM (#7134502) Journal
    Without even using the thing, they just see "windows" and automatically go :-(

    At least let it show what it has to offer before you automatically go "well, I'll NEVER use that peice of shitty windoze-crap!" Sheesh...

    • You must be new here.
    • I don't think it's really bias. It's a geek site, and a large percentage of the readers like to mess around with the code of anything and everything they can. Windows on a device means by default you're not going to be able to do that with any of the software on it that you don't go out and search for, or write yourself.
      • So, why can't you write win CE apps ?

        That falls under my comment of "or write yourself". Writing for WindowsCE isn't nearly as much of a pain as it used to be, especially now that SDL is available for it. But that defeats the whole purpose of buying an Operating System or Distro for me. Modifying existing programs in an enviroment that almost suits my needs is fun. Having to build the majority of the enviroment from the ground up to get the same effect is a waste of time and the money spent on trying to
    • A man rings your doorbell. When you open the door, he punches you in the nose and runs away. The next morning he's back with a baseball bat in his hands. Do you open the door to see "what he has to offer?" Maybe he's offering a great price on a baseball bat?

      Some of us are black and blue from Microsoft. We're in no hurry to open any more doors for them.
    • Maybe if you were aware of the history of Psion, you would realize that their home-grown OS had high levels of productivity and usefuleness/data intergchange for over a decade.

      The frowny face at Psions with WinCE isn't just anti-microsoft bigotry, it's a userbase who was satisfied who has now been given a bait-and-switch.
    • I have had Windows CE devices... They are flaming pieces of shit, and I will never even think of trying that again.

      Unconditional hate of Windows is justified.
      • What do you find so bad about them?

        I've had two different iPaqs over the past 3 years, and apart from the size, they are pretty good. They've got pretty good handwriting recognition (I've tried to go back to Graffiti on Palms, but it's painful in comparison - don't know whether the latest ones have addressed that). The apps pretty much do what I want from an organiser. They are certainly not perfect (size, as mentioned, and build quality - my first one died 3 days after the 1 year warrenty ran out), but th

        • What do you find so bad about them?

          There's an incredible large number of things, I'm sure I'll leave some out here...

          Performance. On a 100+MHz processor, WinCE apps take an incredibly long time to open, even compared to the apps on my 36MHz Psion5. Every time you do something, click on something, etc., you have to wait. EPOC/Symbian is just so much snappier.

          Stability. Using the device regularly, it would just completely corrupt all my data almost like clockwork, once every week. I admit I'm a heavy-

  • Not for that much..... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 04, 2003 @06:30PM (#7134515)
    the price is over $1500, I'd rather buy a fully functional laptop for that price. /overpriced
    • I'm thinking you can view this as either a mini-laptop with mobile or a super-PDA.

      As a mini-laptop, I'd start just below entry level for a new laptop, and add the value of wireless. New laptops start in the $600-700 range, so we'll say 550 plus $100 for wireless is $650.

      As a super-PDA, you might be able to justify it as a step up from a Sharp SL-C7xx series, which would take you into the $800-900 range.

      Either way, it seems overpriced to me.

      Jon Acheson
      • Actually, it should be about $1000 - at least - mini-laptops run $1500-2000. Still, I'd much rather pay $100 more and carry a pound more to get a real mini-laptop. Psion has ALWAYS been overpriced, especially in the US, except on the bottom of the line, where it sucks.
    • "the price is over $1500, I'd rather buy a fully functional laptop for that price. /overpriced "

      You buy stuff like this for a specific reason, not for general computing. It's sort of like saying "I'd rather buy a fully fuctional car than a bus pass." This is not a mass-market product, so you shouldn't be worrying about buying it over a laptop. Instead you should be thinking about whether or not it has specific qualities that would solve a problem for you. If it does, but the price is too high, then yo

  • It's too big! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by fejikso ( 567395 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @06:33PM (#7134524) Homepage
    Have you seen the size of the device?

    IMHO, those big-sized PDA's have not and will not be successful because they are too big to be as convienient as a palm-sized PDA but too small to be enjoy the benefits of a notebook.

    So, in the end, it doesn't matter which OS it'll use... people won't like it and won't buy it.
    • IMHO, those big-sized PDA's have not and will not be successful because they are too big to be as convienient as a palm-sized PDA but too small to be enjoy the benefits of a notebook.

      It's aimed at the corporate market - who will buy it because it has an 8 hour life on one charge (with a wireless card) and is much harder to mess up than a laptop. It also can display a decent ammount of a technical manual and work with an Extech wireless printer [extech.com] - an ideal type of device for a company like Sears and their
    • Exactly. Once it's too big to carry in my pocket, I really don't care how big it is because I'm going to carry it in a bag anyway.
    • Don't let the Windows CE fool you. This isn't a Pocket PC, this is a subnotebook.

      I have an old laptop computer that is far less powerful than this thing; it also has an 800x600 16-bit display, but it weighs almost twice as much and has one-quarter the battery life. This thing's 400 MHz processor, 128 MB of RAM, and 20 MB of available flash memory are already enough for many applications, and you can always add more storage in one of the three slots (PC card, CompactFlash, SD/MMC).

      This thing has several

  • Choice of OS - not so surprising (Score:4, Interesting)

    by vlad_petric ( 94134 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @06:35PM (#7134531) Homepage
    Symbian is great & all (extremely stable, low footprint, etc.), but in terms of programmability it just sucks badly. Because it's meant to be used on devices with small memories, even doing "simple" operations on strings can be quite a chore. This advantage is crucial for something like a phone, but it's not unusual for a PDA these days to have 64M+ (very limited gains here). Furthermore, the non-standard programming style makes portability a serious issue.

    Of course, it would have been nicer if their choice was Linux. OTOH my current Linux PDA (Zaurus) can't really be sync-ed with my Linux Desktop (unless i downgrade my ROM or use OpenZaurus, which is a mess in itself), whereas a WinCE one can ...


  • From the ZDNet article:
    "If you're thinking of buying a NetBook Pro to replace your notebook, note that Psion has no intention of directly supporting individual consumers at this stage."

    And even if it were at $1500 US there are better options.

    I suppose you need to add a couple more ":-(" in your title.

  • Who would want this? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fbw ( 69311 ) * on Saturday October 04, 2003 @06:38PM (#7134546)
    ...when you have alternatives that beat the device on all fronts?


    The Fujitsu P1000 [fujitsu.com] is lighter, smaller in all dimensions, has a larger screen, higher resulution, twice the memory, significantly more storage space (hard drive instead of 32mb flash), comparable battery life, also a touch screen, and it's even cheaper to boot too. Oh, and it runs Windows 2000 or XP instead of CE.NET, or potentially your alternative OS of choice if you spend enough effort in it.

  • What's the point? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by saihung ( 19097 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @06:39PM (#7134551)
    There were many great things about Psion palmtops - their clamshell formfactors with actual usable keyboards, their lightweight power requirements (several days on a charge), and yes, their OS. The netBook/Series 7 really never did much for me - it was basically laptop sized, still ran EPOC/Symbian OS so it could (more or less) only run simple PDA style apps, and was, like this machine, expensive. I don't see why new Psion this is an improvement. I loved my Revo+, but it always seemed like Psion didn't know what they wanted their product to be or who their audience was. They killed their own products through simple lack of development.

    • I agree.

      The Series 5/5mx (as an evolution from the Series 3) was a good product.

      The Revo was basically a "funky" and slightly cut-down version of the 5/5mx; that came out sometime after the 5mx, and just before the Series 7. I have had no experience with it, but I could see where they were aiming it. Unfortunately their target market probably wasn't big enough, didn't need the keyboard, and was happy with the functionality offered by mobile phones (which were becoming more sophisticated at this time). The
  • This is prolly a dumb question, but why can't it run Linux? Can't you buy it and load Linux on it? It *does* hook up to a PC, after all. *shrug* Just my dumb question of the day...
    • Dont make that mistake, i have a Casio Cassiopiea PocketPC and windows is on the ROM, you cant bypass it (why would Microsoft allow that?) and it comes with such useless things filling up the limited space as "AOL Sign Up" (you'll use that once if that and its stuck there for ever) and an un-bypassable tutorial when you hard-reset it that shows you how to "cut and paste" and it damn wont let you pass until you bloody well cut and past that example apointment! And ofcourse casio decided to stick their own ca
    • It's actually quite a good question, and I would believe that even if currently there is no support for Linux, the PsiLinux project [sourceforge.net] will eventually get Linux running on it. More information about running Linux on Psion PDAs is available at the aforementioned site.
  • I'm looking forward to the day that the NYT uses emoticons in headlines. Thanks, /., for showing me how classy and trust-inspiring that sort of thing can be!

  • Expensive PDAs (Score:2, Interesting)

    by damacer ( 713360 )
    I'd like to hear how useful most people find the more 'advanced' features in high end PDAs.

    For me a PDA is does its job well as a electronic todo-list, calandar and address-book. Any lowend PDA has all of the features. So, is it really worth it pay the extra cash for a highend model?
    • As an SysAdmin, I'm waiting for something like this to knock off all my "secretary" PCs. This has almost enough guts for 90% of office workers needs. Definately would meet student's needs. But other posters are right, it's WAY overpriced. This should be $500-$700 tops. and it's got no NIC! I'd really like a PalmOS version of this though. That would bring Palm into the bigtime, and there are already lots of apps ready. Remember, it's time for simplicity over cool features!

      We're looking at the Post-PC

  • Graphic emoticon support! Soon slashdot will be just as cool as MSN 6 and those boards that are full of emoticons, images, etc.

  • Wrong chassis (don't care about the OS) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gdav ( 2540 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @06:45PM (#7134577)
    The Netbook! It is, and always was, TOO BLOODY BIG.

    I wish they would continue developing the Psion Series 5 line, which has the best small keyboard ever made. I'm being very careful with my last surviving 5mx, but nothing lasts forever.

    I was really impressed by Epoc32 at the time (mid 1990s?) but I'd buy an updated Series 5 running anything - Linux, Symbian Quartz, MS Pocket PC - whatever. Just so long as they kept the keyboard. And fixed the stylus retainer!
  • A Psion running CE, that really is a fate worse than death.

  • Why is this so expensive? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hirschma ( 187820 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @06:50PM (#7134591)
    I'm asking, actually curious if anyone has any insight.

    I mean, it has an embedded processor, little memory, a small low-res screen, likely no graphic chip, no hard drive, smaller battery, etc. Every component is cheaper than what you'd find in the cheapest consumer notebook. And they aren't supporting consumers, so that cost is reduced.

    My guess is that the R&D came mostly from a cheap/freely licenseable reference board.

    Is this simply a function of economies of scale, the fact that their target audience is price insensitive or has few other options, or is there something else at play that I'm not seeing?

    Jonathan
  • I really respected Psion. They made usable PDAs long before the Palm computer was released. They came with a usable keyboard, yet had a small size to fit in a pocket. With long battery life.

    I loved my Revo. It was small and had a great look. With a real keyboard. And the built in symbian OS and applications were great.

    And now this! Too big for a PDA, and runs Windos for crissake! They have gone from innovative unique products to this totally uninteresting yet another WinThing. Bleh!

    I just wonder what I s

  • Hmm (Score:5, Informative)

    by pr0c ( 604875 ) * on Saturday October 04, 2003 @07:19PM (#7134696)
    We use a rugged Psion Handheld with an RFID reader to identify livestock electronically (approx 50 sets) as seen here http://www.insight.com/uk/apps/productpresentation /index.php?product_id=PSIMX2MB [insight.com].

    It couldn't possibly be a less reliable piece of shit. Memory cards randomly stop responding, it thinks its batteries are too low to operate even when fresh. Devices attached to it such as the RFID reader stop responding randomly.

    I've had one get hot enough be uncomfortable to your hand but not hot enough to burn (it stopped working of course) and others just stop working all together. They are rated for a 1 meter drop on concrete and we had one stop working after a 2 foot drop off of a chair onto carpet and die.

    I guess the only thing worse than these Handhelds is the RFID reader manufactured by a different company, Hotraco, that misread often if they bother to read at all. We have gone through a few dozen failed units and had to mail the rest to the factory for an internal wiring weakness repair as an oversight from the factory.

    Anyway.. I guess all I'm getting as is you'll never see me buy a Psion PDA. At least my Psion Goldcard works well!
  • Firstly, at least Psion acknowledge that the PDA form factor is a dead end, with increasingly powerful phone platforms making it irrelevant to the modern market.

    However I do think that it's odd that they've decided to differentiate their new offering by aiming at a 'laptop-lite' kind of product. It's like something from five years ago. The price just seems far too high, especially compared to Sony offerings in the sub-notebook and PDA+keyboard markets (which are expensive in themselves).

    The decision to us
  • come back
    return?
  • Not the more expensive Pdas .

    We need a pda that cost around $70 dollars.

    A replacement for graphing calculators would be nice.

    The LCD screen is what i am guessing is causing the prices to still be up there.

    • It's inexpensive, $100 direct from >a href="http://www.softfield.com/vr3.html">Softfiel d or maybe $70 direct from Softfield's eBay sales, or even more inexpensively purchase a Vtech Helio (linux compatible) from eBay for about $25(used, missing items) to $55.00 (used and complete or new). The Vtech Helio has a faster (~70MHz) CPU than the Softfield VR3 version 2's (~66MHz) CPU, but it has less ROM/RAM (6MB/8MB) than the SoftfieldTech's VR3 version 2's ROM/RAM (16MB/16MV). Keep in mind, Vtech Helio
    • you mean colour screens are expensive? guess so. but greyscale lcd's are dirt cheap. there are a number of pda's (palm lookalikes) that sell for around 30 or less / $50 in the UK. e.g. Sharp ZQ's, Franklin's etc. they're not great. but i would guess in a couple of years time tungsten lookalikes will be the same price. (nice keyboard, wireless etc). i would guess the cost is the memory as well as the screen. and probably the battery charger.... (plus the OS of course if you're paying someone like palm or m$)
    • I think the pricing scheme will alway be like it is, just as with PCs. High-end PDAs will cost around $800, $300-400 will be mid-range, and $200 will be an entry model (and anything above $1000 will be considered overpriced). What you will get for this price will vary, of course. Today's high-end systems will be tomorrows lower end.

      I wonder if anyone will come up with customizable PDAs, just like PCs or, to a lesser extend, Laptops. Since PDAs are small and highly integrated, this might take quite some t
    • I'm curious about what you actually want from a PDA. My phone (T68) has a calendar and a phonebook (the two functions I really need from a PDA). It also lets me make voice and data (GPRS) calls and syncs with a computer. The keyboard is not great for typing anything more than a few words, but if I need to type more than that I use a laptop. Oh, and it cost less than $70.

  • I thought Psions were much better than Palms (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LeoDV ( 653216 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @07:47PM (#7134805) Journal
    A long long time ago, PDA's didn't have built-in cameras, or tiny keyboards, and wireless computing was holding the infrared port of your PDA an inch close to that of your cellphone, not Wi-Fi.

    Can you remember? It was back when the hi-tech Palm to have was the Palm V but Palm IIIs were really the more affordable ones, it was also the height of the war between Palm and Psion. I decided I needed a PDA (I later found out I'm not rich and don't have the need, so I still don't have a PDA), and sampled each of the two big flavas (ooh), i.e. fold-out with keyboard and palm-likes, and found the fold-out kind to be vastly superior to the other, simply because input was made easier by the keyboard.

    Even if you know Graffiti, it's a long way to input things. You have to make a movement with your pen. So you can use the virtual keyboard, which eats up half of your screen, but you can only touch one key then move to the other. But then when I used the fold-out PDAs (my preference wasn't towards a Psion but a clone by Ericsson), holding it with both hands in front of me walking on the street, I could type with both thumbs. All things considered, since a keyboard layout is extremely familiar, and since I had two input sticks (my thumbs) instead of only one on the palm, I quickly achieved a much faster input speed, with a bigger screen... I loved it.

    Of course it depends on what you use it for. My use for PDA's was to jolt down ideas, so my emphasis was on what I could use to type in a lot of words. If you use it for scheduling, the palm-type might be better. Either way, Psion went out of business shortly thereafter and I always regretted their smart little devices. I know there have been others [dynamism.com] since then that have used the same basic layout (actually if I had to pick a device I'd probably pick a Hiptop [hiptop.com]), but my point is that I've always been nostalgic about Psion and it's good to see them back, even with Win installed.

    I'm sure we'll see a NetBSD port before the week-end is over anyway, right? ;-)

  • Psion Teklogix, NOT Psion Computers (Score:5, Informative)

    by gidds ( 56397 ) <slashdot.gidds@me@uk> on Saturday October 04, 2003 @08:02PM (#7134877) Homepage
    Don't get too excited. Psion Teklogix [teklogix.com], producer of the original netBook and now this update, is not exactly the same company which made the Series 5mx [series5mx.com] &c. It only seems interested in corporate accounts, in large orders and vertical markets. (It was formed from Psion Enterprise and Teklogix International; I suspect that the latter had by far the stronger influence.) Psion Computers, the consumer-oriented branch and producers of the Organiser, Organiser II, Series 3/a/c/mx, Siena, Series 5/5mx, and Revo, is effectively long gone...

    Please sign this online petition [petitiononline.com] if you'd like to see the netBook Pro running EPOC/Symbian OS. I doubt it'll have any immediate effect, but by indicating people's interest in the platform, it may yet do some longer-term good.

    I mourn the loss of Psion as was... while Symbian may have kept the core OS alive and in demand, that's no good to us if it's not being employed (or even promoted) in a form factor which can demonstrate its strengths. :(

    It's a credit to Psion that, for all its screen problems, the 5mx is still an amazing bit of kit - still my machine of choice, to which nothing else comes close. I just wish that they'd recognise that achievement and cultivate it. If only they'd not chickened out of the market; a little marketing and promotion would have done wonders. [fx: sigh]

  • imagining the Beowulf of those :-(

  • Dyslexic users and education (Score:5, Informative)

    by Nick_Gunz ( 141133 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @09:03PM (#7135084)
    There's an aspect of this whole Psion giving up on the Series 5 that I've never seen reported anywhere, but which has deep personal relevance to me and countless others. It sounds odd to say it, but Psion computers changed my life in a very real way, and now they're not making them my life is going to get a lot worse.

    I'm dyslexic (learning disabled to North Americans). I find it very difficult to write by hand and am unable to take notes effectively except by keyboard. Right now I'm a PhD student at the University of Cambridge but, if I handn't had access to a computer, I'd never have been able to finish high school.

    I used to carry a full sized notebook, but these computers have many problems including lack of portability, inadiquate battery life, and the fact that they're just to big to sit on those little note taking tablets they have in university classrooms. There are countless daily tasks I couldn't acomplish on such a low-portability, slowly deploying system.

    But Psion S5 computers are differnt. They are small, they are light enough to be carried everywhere. They take AA batteries that can be easily replaced on the fly and come in several convenient rechargable formats. They're instant on, so they can be used just like a non-disabled person would use a peice of paper. But most importantly, they have a full touch type keyboard. No other comptuer of its size now has a keyboard that can be used for touchtyping.

    It is that last factor that makes these machines so useful to people with writing problems. Without these computers I am too disabled to do my job. With them I am able to fulfill my potential in my chosen field. Taking them away from me is like breaking the hands of a pianist.

    The frustrating thing is that I can see such a ready market for these little machines. Everywhere around me are classrooms full of students writing away on paper when they would much rather be writing on a computer. I even see students perched awkwardly near ill placed power outlets, or sitting on the floor so that they can use their full sized notebook computers. How many of them would pay for a small touch-type computer if it were aimed at the student market? I'd be willing to bet a lot of them. Perhaps even the majority.

    But small computer have always been aimed at executives, and executives don't need them, because executives have offices and secretaries and such. As a result of this misdirection in the PDA market, thousands and thousands of disabled people are being robbed of their potential and their future. I don't know what I'll do when I can't get any more Psion S5 machines. They don't last forever. I'm beginning to suspect my status as a non-disabled person won't last forever either.

    You see a nice toy that never really sold well. I see a big part of my future disapearing.

    - NG
    • Indeed... I'm not dyslexic at all, but the Psion 5 was the second handheld computer I bought... The first was a Windows CE that I thrashed after a couple weeks, because it's completely useless for just about ANYTHING...

      The Psion 5 however, was incredibly great for taking notes, or even writing up full-featured documents/reports. I could embed a spreadsheat/graph/image into a word document, just like you can with the Office suites on computers. I could type up an entire paper anywhere I happened to be,

    • I second that; I have used a Psion 5 (not mx, unfortunately) to take notes for two postgraduate qualifications (the second one, a masters, I am completing at the moment).

      It's the perfect tool for students and this purpose:
      - inexpensive (relatively) at only 200-300 pounds;
      - runs off standard AA batteries for a reasonable amount of time, or you could use nimh rechargable AA's (I do);
      - has a workable keyboard you can actually type on in class;
      - has a touch screen, so you can draw images into your documents;
      -
    • I'd recommend a Fujitsu Lifebook P1000-series, or something similar, running linux. with the optimizations that can be made to the boot process (as recently reported here), you can likely get it to boot in under a second without too much hastle.
    • so don't let the S5 go away, stock up a couple now for when yours die.

      Seriously, i will never know how useful this machine is to you, but the way you described its importance, i would suggest getting on ebay, or the like, and buying 1 or 2 extra S5s, with maybe a couple spare pens, and whatever accesories that could be hard to find in the future, then pack them away for when your currect S5 dies.

      Best of luck to you with your PhD
  • I've been a Psion user since the Series3, back when their most serious competition was still the Wizard. The software was always first-rate, and the design (fitting a usable alpha keypad in a pocketable device) impressive. Unfortunately the units just weren't built to last, with materials that couldn't hold up to the clever folding designs. At least it gave me excuses over the years to replace the S3 with an S3a with a Revo with a Revo+.

    So, what have we here? Take a Psion. Remove the Symbian software

  • I won't be using one. Psion, once an innovative company, is now an irrelevant M$ cloner, doomed to continually decreasing margins, while any profits from their products increasingly go Bill Gates' way.

    You'd have thought they would have learned from the mobile phone industry and realise why that industry is loathe to touch MS witrh a barge pole.

  • For 30% more you can buy... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) ( 613870 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @12:10AM (#7135757) Journal
    ...3 times better [dynamism.com]. Rather sad. I still have a working Psion II, streets ahead in its day. But Psion lost their way long ago. I didn't even make fun of my friend who bought a Netbook. There was no challenge in ridiculing such an easy target.
  • .... I want PDA + Cellphone + MP3 player. And a $1500 PDA?? Now who would want that??

    • I have one. You could have one too. http://www.t-mobile.com/products/overview.asp?phon eid=166765

      There's probably even newer phones than this, but this is the one I have, and I like it. As far as it being a MP3 player, I haven't tried that out. It *should* work for that, I just haven't bothered to try.
  • Psion have said that their support for the old palmtops will run out in 2004 at which point I better pray that nothing goes wrong with my 5MX. Knowing this, I've been looking for something to potentially replace it on that fateful day. OK, so modern PDAs have fast processors, colour, USB, Bluetooth etc etc.

    But the Psion has a keyboard... and that just pisses over the usability of them...

    I've owned various Psions over the years and I can still count the crashes on one hand.

    I'm going to miss it.

    • I had a 3 for a few years, adn the only time it ever required a reset was when I found that the `change password' dialog let you type in escape characters, but unlock dialog didn't, resulting in it requiring a hard reset to blank the memory before I could unlock it.
  • The Psion Netbook was way ahead of it's time when it came out. 10hrs. + battery time under full load, 640 by 480 color display, fully Java compliant, built in Webbrowser, built in IDE for C/C++, Java and the Epoc PL (name?), word processor, spreadsheet and so on. It walked all over any other PDA and Notebook back then. It was exceptionally expensive, but it ruled.
    It's a shame they waste such a well balanced system that's custom built to fit the Epoc OS on WinCE.
    The bright side: The last stashes of old Netbo
  • ...larger than a pda?

    Sounds like a roll of toilet paper.

    Too bad TP already has the market covered.

  • ...is thousands of Psion users gnashing their teeth in frustration. Of all the changes Psion could have made to revive their fortunes as a maker of PDA-type computers, this is quite possibly the most stupid. Their EPOC operating system and the software that came with it was, in my opinion, the best part of the Psion computers I've used (series 3c, 3mx, 5 and 5mx).

    Over the last six years, I've owned five Psions, two of which I bought as spares after I found out Psion were going to stop making them. (From ot

  • AN ANONYMOUS RAAEDR WRIETS FORBS HAS AN ARTICL3 ABOUT TEH COME BAK OF PSION IN TEH HIGH END PDA MARKET!!!11 PSIONS OS SYMBIAN TAHT USED 2 POWER THEYRE PDA (AS DA REVO FOR AXMPLE OR DA S3REIS 3 OR DA S3REIS 5) HAS B3N MOSTLY USED IN C3L PHON3S LAETLY LIEK TEH NOKIA 36501!!!11!1 WTF LOL ACORDNG 2 FORBSS ARTICL3 DA NU PSION LAP2P/PDA TEH NATBOK PRO WIL NOT B POWARED BY SYMBIAN OS BUT BY MICROSOFT C3N3T!1!11 PROS2AELX POINTS OUT A ZDNET REVEIW OF DA D3VIEC WHICH IS SMALAR THAN UR USUAL NOT3BOK PC BUT LARGER THA

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