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Hardware

New Psion Palmtop 79

Posted by Hemos from the lotsa-fun-inyour-hand dept.
Chris O'Byrne writes "Psion have announced the Series 7 laptop computer. It's sub-notebook sized, around $1,000 (though only initially available in the U.K.), with 8.5 hours battery life, 640x480 colour LCD touch-screen display, instant-on, and all the usual connectivity and other extras from a Psion computer. The O.S. is Symbian EPOC 32. Looks like an expanded and beefed-up Series 5mx. "
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New Psion Palmtop More

New Psion Palmtop

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  • When I think of an upgrade from 'Series 5' to 'Series 7' I think of a major overhaul.Yes,the hardware is much better,but it's the same plain old EPOC32 OS with the same apps and the same tools,and the only new piece of SW (the Java VM) is already in the 5mx.
    Symbian,please move faster.
  • Oh yes,and by seven I mean the version number,not the machine.
  • No moving parts is definitely an advantage, but the main deal as I see it is the battery life. I own a Libretto which currently runs linux and I'm lucky to get an hour and a half running time out of it.

    Eight and a half is far more like it. You can't be truly mobile with under three hours charge.

  • OK....so Palmtops are getting bigger and more powerful.....Laptops are getting smaller and more streamlined.

    So the palmtops are going to meet the laptops halfway? Then of course the more powerful (more useful) laptop (notebook... whatever) will render the palmtops obsolete....

    If palmtops want to keep the market they must stay palm sized or get smaller....place the functionality of a palm into a watch...or a phone (hey....that's been done already)...or a pair of sunglasses (watch out for that lampost......!)

    As technology inreases laptops will get smaller...no doubt about it.....Flash Rom cards willl increase in capacity, decrease in price.....win X on a flash rom card....now that should boot up quicker....

    Flexible plastic screens......displays that link to your brain...you see it inside your head....spooky. How many colours does your imagination have. And does it check spelling?

    I digress....

    As the computer will be controlled by thoughts...and then relay the outcome back to the brain (bypassing those cumbersome things we call eyes) then all we will have is a rather silly looking baseball cap with electrodes and maybe a HUD for old times sake. Head tops......

    Boy now it's getting silly......

    who knows what may happen next....maybe we could use our brains for once.

    I have a palm pilot...I use it to play chess...I'm a very disorganised person....far to disorganised to be bothered to use my palm pilot to organise myself. Only organised people use palm efficiently, that's why they're so organised.
    Figures....think about it.

    CU.
  • Interesting that they measured in mm. Trying to make it sound small I guess. For us yankee rebels that works out to about 9 1/4 by 7 1/2 by 1 1/4 inches. Not really that small to me.

    I almost bought a S5 twice, but when I finally played with one I found that I had trouble seeing the screen due in high glare due to the touch screen overlay. Is the 5mx screen look any better?
  • I've considered making a switchmode powersupply to sit on a car battery. You need to know how many watthours your battery holds, then you simply divide by your powersupply wattage to get a rough figure.
  • You're absolutely right. The big problem with EPOC32 is the file formats.

    What this means is that, unless Psion actively supports connectivity with your desktop OS of choice, you're limited to transfering *text* files from the word processor - and that's it.
    Even when Psion does support another OS, as it does the Mac, it does so half-heartedly. MacConnect, the connection software for EPOC32 and the Mac, doesn't translate at all - making it pretty useless.

    It's a shame, as the Psion machines are really nice. I've seen the Series 7 and it's lovely - I'm almost tempted to buy one even though I can't connect it to either my Linux machine or my Mac (I'd have to use SoftWindows instead).

    You can read a review I did of the Series 5mx from a Mac user's perspective at http://www.macuser.co.uk/guest/printreview.php3?id =34763
  • It all depends on power management. The great thing about the Psion devices is that they can get 8+ hours battery life (weeks in the case of a 5mx), which means you don't have to worry about it. Laptop power performance, at the moment, isn't good enough.
  • With the hype and popularity of the winCE 'palmtops'(especially with the manufacturers) Psion needed to do something.

    Why?

    Over the past couple of years Psion have been attacked by their shareholders and the press to launch an equivalent device.

    O.K. The WinCE may look 'cool' but personally I find them a wee bit pointless(I know of a few people who bought them, did not like them because the GUI was fiddly to use, sent them back and bought a Psion 5 instead - and never looked back.)

    Aspects of the Psion machines in general are:
    a) Physically better designed
    b) The OS is more suited to this class of device
    c) The applications have always been written for minimal screen space
    d) Usable battery life

    They had to come up with something or risk losing marketshare(happening already) and a diminishing reputation.

    As with most companies, Psion to had to listen to their customers or lose them to rivals.

    I personally own a Psion 3C and must say that it is excellant product to use (if only Linux would run on this thing!)

  • It will be released at the end of the month. That's not too far away, and this certainly can't be considered vapourware.

    As for the MicroDrive, the S7 has a CFII slot - although the specs don't specifically say that it won't support the MD, the netBook ones do, and it's basically the same machine. I can't imagine that Psion would remove that functionality.

    More specs: [ Series 7 [psion.com] ] [ netBook [psion.com] ].

  • Oops! Should have said "don't specifically say that it does support the MD"...
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • 3Com/Palm seem to have the same problem.

    I know that 4 is skipped because it's seen as unlucky is certain asian cultures. I don't know why 6 is skipped in both product lines.

  • I'm sorry, I was hasty to criticize; there was very little in the way of specs on the press release and I was going by other /.'ers comments.
    The libretto (and any other notebook) has a "suspend" feature which generally takes well under 30 seconds to resume. This works fine under linux as well as windows. It also seems that if you want access to "corporate data" then Windows 95/98/NT would be the ideal solution.

    If you can point me to more detailed specs on the Psion, I may find myself eating my words, but it seems that right now it's too big and too expensive to be a PDA and too wimpy to compete with the libretto.

    -nosilA
  • The 5mx apparently does have an improved screen on it. I've seen it on the site. They really did improve a lot with the 5mx in other areas besides that, too.

    However, the Itsy did use a StrongARM processor also, from what I remember of reading the site. It used a 200Mhz one though, so doing any Itsy porting work would be a bit slower.

    The Psion would be the perfect machine to port it to though because of two reasons:

    1. OS in flash.
    2. StrongARM processor.

    The mere existence of an alternative OS for the device would be enough to get me to buy one, since then getting apps to work with it such as IRC, ssh, Telnet, ftp, and a decent web browser would be not hard to do.


  • Man, don't get me started on that. Considering the design talent of the Newton folks, one can only wonder where two more years of development would have yeilded. It wouldn't have been no iNewt either!

  • Just wondering where I could get a portable ATX power supply?

    I am not much with wires, but simple wiring might also be an option.

    And how long would a desktop run off of a motorcycle battery?

  • Are Psion moving in the wrong direction (Score:3)

    by hedgehog_uk ( 66749 ) on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @10:03AM (#1697855) Homepage
    Until about 1990, Psion were a small company making hand-held data-entry machines. Their big break came with the Series 3. The 3 packs a lot of usability into a tiny package and is still selling well, due to a few minor upgrades over the years. My series 3 is used every day, does pretty much everything I want it to and lasts about 3 months on 2 AA batteries. Psion's newer machines (the 5 and now the 7) are larger, heavier and have comparatively short battery lives.

    My series 3 lives in my pocket, it's always there and always ready when I need it. I couldn't do that with anything any bigger or heavier. I don't have to worry about it running low on batteries either. The 7 wouldn't fit in a pocket (at least not without the optional 'special trousers') and according to Psion's press release, would need recharging every day.

    What (IMHO) Psion should be doing, is concentrating on the area in which they are strongest. That is, on a replacement for the now long-in-the-tooth series 3, with more power, maybe colour, maybe a JVM and definitely comms, decent PC connectivity and Epoch. All in a package as small as the 3 and with decent battery life (say a month for 2 AA cells).

    The last machines that Psion produced that were the size of the 7 got great reviews and didn't sell. I hope that they have more luck with the 7 and the netbook, but I really think that they should be concentrating on their core area of excellence, which is producing brilliant pocket-sized palmtops.

    HH
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I think they really should have come up with a brand new name for the '7 - it's targetted at a different market to the Series 3/Series 5 which came before it. From the pictures of it you can't easily tell that it's much bigger either - it's roughly the same shape.

    I wouldn't say no to one if it were offered, of course, but until they come out with jeans with jumbo pockets this one's not for me.

  • FYI: StrongARM II coming soon (Score:5)

    by ChrisRijk ( 1818 ) on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @04:18AM (#1697859)
    See info on Intel's web site. [intel.com]. About time too - the current StrongARM hasn't been updated much in 3 years. The new one (to be produced on a 0.18micron fab) can run up to 600Mhz (while consuming just 0.45W), while in low power mode it consumes just 0.04W while running at 150Mhz.
  • Well, it runs the Symbian OS right now. The only remaining technical issue to be solved is to, uhm, replace 'Sym' with 'De'.
  • This looks like a newton-sized device. Unless you're Joe Young, it probably won't fit in your palm. And yes; it does make a difference. Something that fits in a pocket can be with you, always, whenever you're awake. Something that fits in a fanny pack can be back at your desk... let me go check.

  • laptop replacement? (Score:3)

    by sql*kitten ( 1359 ) on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @04:24AM (#1697863)
    I'm hoping this machine will be an adequate laptop replacement. It's subnotebook sized, which looks big enough for touch typing, the screen is apparently quite clear. I'm very happy with my Series 5, but I need more and I don't want a Libretto, EPOC is a great OS, fast, rock solid, good communications facilities. A slightly beefier but similar machine is the NetBook but no pricing information or detailed application information is available yet.

    What I specifically want is a better word processor and spreadsheet - for programming and computing I have sizeable Suns and NT servers, but I need a machine I can take anywhere and work on documents with, the office is too distracting. This is one reason the S5 is so great, it has several times more battery life than any CE machine. Proper indexes, nested bullet lists, footnotes/endnotes, better font support, better table support, etc, would make this a perfect machine for me.

  • I don't think the market for such a device is very large. WinCE failed because you can get very powerful laptops at similar size and weight, just at a slightly higher price (just look at the latest sub-notebook offerings from Sony, Sharp, IBM), so I wonder if the Psion 7 will sell well at US$1000. I'd find one useful at half the price, but for $1000 I expect to have at least some disk storage (which would fit easily in that form factor).
  • I wonder if this will run Linux 7k [calcaria.net] or is there a strongARM port of linux yet - 100MHz off a palmtop in linux - love to see the compile times on that, actually, love to see X run off that!
  • Check it out at http://www.calcaria.net/ [calcaria.net] Linux looks pretty good on it. I am actually thinking of buying a Psion 5, but I can't find a supplier. :-(
  • It would be nice to have several different form factors for a single model. I've got a Thinkpad i1450 now, but the thing is big and heavy. I rather like the teeny size of the Psion machine and I think that I would choose a machine of that size over a larger unit. But not everyone is the same as me. Offering a Psion 7 in a small, medium, and large size would be a great idea. The basic difference should be only the size of the screen which is the biggest dictator of the overall unit size.

    On the other hand, I have a Newton 130 as well and though it's a great machine, it doesn't have a keyboard which I think is essential, and it doesn't run Linux either. The 130 is a little too small for my tastes too, so the Palm Pilot would only be worse in that regard since it's about 1/3 the size of the Newton. The Psion unit is about as small as you can get and still have a keyboard.
  • Psion announced their netBook for enterprise users a few weeks ago which has the EXACT size and weight dimensions as the Series 7. It's also running the same StrongARM processor as the Series 7 yet 90MHz faster. The netBook ships with 32MB while the Series 7 ships with 16MB.

    Could this simply be a dumbed down netBook model? Hrmmmm ....

    Even more useless PDA babble @ PDA Buzz [pdabuzz.com]
  • That's exactly the same thought I had when I saw an article here a while back about linux on mips palmtops. I wonder what the difference in performance is between the psion and the clio [clio.com].
  • Looks great but am I the only one surprised to not see USB?

    Docking station is interesting.

  • Portable? (Score:3)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 ) on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @05:21AM (#1697872)
    Portable computers? We don't need no stinkin' portables. Real Geeks just put the cases back on their dual-celery boxes and haul them around from place to place. Wusses! All of 'ya! ;)

    --
  • Well AFIK Intel has nothing to do with the Amulet project which is Steve Furber's pet at the university of Manchester (UK). Take a look at the project home page. [man.ac.uk]

    The Amulet is not a StrongARM chip it is a processor that impliments the same instruction set as the ARM7 processor. Its goal is to achieve extremely high power efficency not primarily speed.

    The main advantage of the asynchronous logic is the _very_ low power disipation when idle this is effectively zero. A lot better than the StrongARM design when idle which due to the compromises necessary for higher speeds leaks a subtantial amount of current. Also due to the asynchronous logic not all parts of the need to be running at all times, these logic cuicits do not need power when not in use so there is even less power drain.

    There is another advantage and that is RF emmisions, without a clock there are no high level harmonics in the amulet core making it a very quiet chip.

    LES..

  • Toshiba came out with a computer as powerful as this one, the same size, but with an 850MB hard drive and it runs linux beautifully!

    The size is really nice for fitting into a backpack or if space is tight, and getting used to the keyboard doesn't take much time, but it's no replacement for a real PDA (battery life, suspend time) nor for a desktop (too small to type comfortably) and the psion doesn't even have PCMCIA or anything...

    They were a bit more than $1k, but you can get the 75MHz (OCable to 120) on ebay for $500... and I'm selling mine if anyone is interested (I managed to get ahold of a Sparcbook)... They have new one, the Libretto 110 [toshiba.com] for $1600 with a 233MHz processor in them.

    Sure the touch screen in this Psion is cute, but if they want to compete, they are going to have to bring down the price.
  • The port for the current psion is less applicable to this box - as it uses a SA1100 instead of the old 7100, the SA1100 port of linux is more what you'd base it on (apart from things like the EPOC bootloader which would most likely stay common).

    Several people, including ourselves, have done quite a bit with the SA1100 port. Pity they didn't put the USB slave port on there, especially seeing as you just need to add the connector (USB slave is part of the 1100).

    Hugo
    empeg

  • CLM? (Score:1)

    by Jules ( 2226 )
    Or "Career Limiting Move" to spell it out.

    I sold my Newton to the CEO of our company three weeks before they stoped making them. Thankfully it's a good job market and I didn't get canned :-)

  • Is this a bit of a first ? I've never had the privalidge of seeing a major new product being launched first in the United Kingdom before.

    Brilliant, and about time too !

    Funnily enough, the UK is often used for test-marketing purposes for the rest of Europe and the UK ... so now you know :)

    Simon
  • Ooops... make that "The rest of europe and the US" :)

    Si
  • Possible fun: the PLL multiplier to set the CPU speed in the SA1100 is a software-writable register. SA1100's, as far as I remember, only go down to 133Mhz - 100Mhz is probably simply battery saving on their part. There's a lot of opportunity to write the PPCR register and get some more speed :)

    Hugo
    empeg
  • Very suprising seeing the SA1100 has USB slave: just add EMC-compliance common-mode chokes, etc and connector - the whole USB transceiver is on-chip.

    Hmmm. Frightened of the software implications perhaps? Older SA1100s did have problematic USB, hence why the empeg has to use an external USB chip.

    Hugo
  • If I could get a secure shell client for this and a wireless hook inside my house, I'd save myself the $2k-ish I need for an iBook [apple.com] and the Airport [apple.com]. I'm a bigger Psion fan than I am an Apple fan but what the heck, I'll use what works and is cheaper. If I wasn't so lazy, I'd pull ethernet through my house but obviously, I'm really lazy.
  • Actually, some stores {althought they don't have any in stock :( } are selling the Libretto 110 for around $1100 [computers4sure.com], not bad eh?



    _______________________________________________
    There is no statute of limitation on stupidity.

  • Re:Portable? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    dual-cereal boxes? pah! When I was a young geek we didn't have any fancy boxes. No, we had to make our own computers. And we *liked it*. Our computers actually were called mainframes, we had accumulators bigger than that Psion thing. And we had to drag these computing devices to every (both of them) party we went to, with a substandard rope! And we *liked it*. /grand pa
  • I was just talking to a friend of mine who's connected to some work on the asynchronous ARM processors... Now THAT is cool stuff.

    -Billy
  • Fortunately that ego-maniacal tyrant Steve Jobs can't touch this baby! So it may be worth developing on...

  • Re:Portable? (Score:3)

    by IHateEverybody ( 75727 ) on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @05:56AM (#1697894) Homepage Journal
    Mainframes? You wuss! When I was a young geek, we had to make due with one-ton collections of vacuum tubes. You needed a whole team of oxen to carry 'em anywhere. They put out so much heat that we had people dyin' of heat stroke at parties. And we liked it!
  • ...Who're copying BMW, or so the story goes. It's more classy, more continental to skip the even numbers. I tell you though, Continental Breakfast reflects poorly on the continent...

  • This new Psion is a good thing. (Score:3)

    by mbpark ( 43131 ) <mbpark@Nospam.diginexus.com> on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @05:58AM (#1697896) Homepage
    I like this device because:

    1. It uses a better OS (EPOC32) than the other StrongARM equipped device, the HP Jornada 820 (which uses CE 2.x). The Jornada 820 runs at 190Mhz, while this runs at 100Mhz, and the Jornada 820 still seems slower!

    2. It's coming from the most established company with the most established brand of palmtops worldwide, Psion.

    3. The OS in it just kicks butt. Symbian really knows how to get speed and functionality out of the OS, unlike CE (which just shovels functionality in with no consequence for runtime).

    4. It supports what I have found to be the most versatile and reliable modem, the Gold Card. Dell uses these in their Latitude laptops. They run about $250, but can support GSM, ISDN, US cellular standards, US phone networks, European phone networks, and is software-upgradable to any standard that it can't support. I'm willing to pay $250 for a good modem, and I've found this to be the best. Apparently, so does Dell. No WinCE winmodems is a good thing.

    5. EPOC32 has a JVM, unlike the CE JVM that Symantec was working on that mysteriously went the way of their other CE Apps such as PcAnywhere and ACT!.

    6. It's got more app support. This truly does have international support like the Palm does. There are a LOT more apps for EPOC than CE. It's the perfect form factor for someone who doesn't want to worry about notebook hard drives. It also can run NetBSD and Linux from what I understand, which just opens up a whole new world of apps.

    7. Don't forget the IBM Microdrive. This works here too.

    8. PCMCIA slot. This means you can combine this with EPOC32, NetBSD, or Linux and use many cool devices with this.
  • > My series 3 is used every day, does pretty much
    > everything I want it to and lasts about 3
    > months on 2 AA batteries. Psion's newer
    > machines (the 5 and now the 7) are larger,
    > heavier and have comparatively short battery
    > lives.

    The 3 is great, but you're being unfair to the '5 by comparing its battery performance to the '7's. My '5 is in daily use and goes about two months between battery changes (though heavy use of the backlight does approximately half this). The '7 on the other hand will have a battery life measured in hours. Ick.

    The advantages of the '5 over the '3 are that EPOC32 is just streets ahead as an operating system. It is properly layered and extensible. It has a TCP stack. It has sensible, usable network applications (from newsreaders to IRC clients. And Hermes, a relatively new telnet program, does a great VT100 emulation).

    I use my '5 with an Ericsson SH888 phone (with built in IrDA modem) to remotely maintain a number of systems by telnet. An ssh client would be wonderful, and should be relatively easy to implement.

  • What advantage is there to buying one of these? The form factor is similar to a subnote, which are coming down to the $1000-$1200 price range, in the US. It's a lot like those CE POS's that cost $1200 and have less than half the functionality of a notebook. I don't see this thing succeeding (or the CE toys) until the price comes down to sub-$600. I wouldn't consider buying one until they reach that price point.
  • Tubes? When I first started using machines, we carved our logic gates out of hickory, and if you wanted memory, you had to mine the iron ore yourself, smelt it, then make the magnets which you would attach to the hickory gates (that's what we called them back then) and you'd have your 1J of memory. It was called J because K hadn't been invented yet...
  • I'll guess it's measured in mm because Psion are a British company, not to make it seem smaller. Most products will be described in Metric dimensions in Europe; they weigh it in at 1150 grams, for example (approx 2.5 lb).
  • If you have a 5MX, you can run the SSH client from MindBright [mindbright.com].
  • Given Psions pricing track record with the S5, it will probably cost the same in US$ as it does in GBP i.e. US$700
  • >What advantage is there to buying one of these?

    Try finding a laptop with 8-9 hour battery life.

  • The problem with EPOC/32 (Score:3)

    by charlie ( 1328 ) <charlie@@@antipope...org> on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @07:51PM (#1697904) Homepage Journal
    Actually, there are several problems with EPOC/32, the OS used by the Series 7 and Series 5 machines. (I say this as a long-term Psion fan -- I've been running their machines since 1991 and currently have a Series 5MX.)

    We'll glide over the fact that EPOC/32 is a proprietary OS. There aren't really any free OS's in the palmtop field yet (unless you count ELKS), so I guess we'll have to let this slide. However, the real headache is the proprietary file formats. EPOC/32 stores data using some kind of object oriented stream store. The file formats are undocumented and Symbian's story is "use our SDK if you want to write apps that can read and write our files."

    This wouldn't have been so bad if they'd provided file format translators as part of the OS -- but they didn't! Instead, translation between EPOC/32 file formats (such as Word and Sheet) is carried out inside the PsiWin link software, on a Windows box. In effect, the EPOC/32 system is turned into an obligate peripheral of a Windows machine because Psion didn't even provide rudimentary RTF or CSV file import/export capabilities for the built-in apps. (Which is a shame, because EPOC/32 is a much better OS than Windows ;-).

    To add insult to injury, the SDK was based on the GNU toolchain but requires a copy of Microsoft Visual C++ to run on. (My guess is that somebody at Psion swallowed too much Microsoft marketing literature back in 1994 and truly believed that Windows was going to conquer the universe, or at least the desktop. As a result, Psion didn't give other platforms the attention they required.)

    Furthermore, Psion blundered quite badly over developer relations back in 1995. For a long time the SDK was also a commercial product which you had to pay an annual license fee for. Symbian realised that this was stupid and made it available for download last June, but this misguided policy had held up the development of a large body of third-party apps by the hobbyist community (which was always a strong point of the SIBO/Series 3 devices). (The result of the change of policy is already becoming visible in the form of a sudden wave of new EPOC/32 software, including native Word->RTF file translators, and all the other stuff that should have been in the OS from the beginning. Like decent ports of vi, perl, and nethack ;-)

    Anyway. I guess my beef with EPOC/32 is that it's a nice OS, let down by having been deployed as if it's a satellite of another platform, namely Windows. If they'd paid more attention to making the Series 5 a "real computer" in its own right with connectivity to peers running different OS's, it would have been a lot more useful.

    For my part, I've come to terms with my Series 5MX and now find it absolutely invaluable, but I'm not really making full use of the built-in application suite because of the file conversion issues. Let this be a warning to you if you plan to buy one and, like me, live in a Windows-free zone!

  • Re:Yay !!! (Score:3)

    by ILikeFish ( 21469 ) on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @06:03AM (#1697905) Homepage
    There are 2 reasons that the S7 is being launched in the UK first:
    1. Psion is a British company.
    2. Psion has a much larger market share over here than over there; WinCE doesn't even get a look in. :-)

    Actually, it makes a change for a company like this to actually listen to it's customers - they were not originally going to release the S7, but were innundated by requests after announcing the netBook.

    epoczone.com [epoczone.com] for Psion software.

  • Actually, the S7/netBook is aimed at a rather different market than the Libretto.

    The netBook is intended for corporate markets where the users require mobile access to corporate data - it even has a JVM. Also, both models use EPOC, which is a far quicker, leaner, more stable and well-designed OS. "Instant on" is a godsend - imagine your PDA taking 60 secs or more to boot!

    BTW, it does have a PCMCIA slot, and a type 2 CF slot which supports the IBM Microdrive...

    epoczone.com [epoczone.com]

  • Right on! I drag this old giant Mid-Tower Box back forth from work everyday, as well as anywhere else I go. Who says you need a notebook or smaller to have a "portable" computer anyways? =]

  • I agree - for a long time I had a Palm Pro, but it got sparser use than I wanted just because it was a little to big to carry with me everywhere.

    Now, I have a Palm V - even with the hard case, you can carry it around even in a jeans pocket. I carry it with me everywhere, and use it constantly...

    I've seen other comments that mention how much they'd like to code or WP with this thing, but it's always seemed to me it would be really hard to do so with such a short (8.9 hours, I think) battery life. What I'd really like to see are detachable screens for the Pilot to present a larger display area when nessicary, like for reading a complex e-book.
  • They really have a problem with sequential model numbering, don't they? :-)
  • Basically, Toshiba and Sony have already managed to squeeze "real" mini-notebooks with a hard drive into this same form factor.

    The new Psion and the WinCE "Jupiter" class handhelds are in the same losing boat. They are about the same size as these mini-notebooks with much less speed and storage. Their only real advantage is that they have no moving parts and cost less (although that isn't quite so clear cut anymore). They'll probably get squeezed out by the mini-notebooks.
  • You never owned an Acorn, then? :)

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