Re: [NTLK] Subject: Psion & jornada curiosity

From: Michael Manthey <michael_manthey_at_magicvillage.de>
Date: Sat Jan 19 2008 - 08:00:28 EST

Hi Andy,

like many on this list I have a collection of Newtons and other organizers, mostly Psions. I used the Newton daily at work for 5 years, taking notes und keeping up on my appointments. Then I tried the Psion 5 and found it remarkable. In a meeting I had come to sit next to a fellow, who was busily typing ayway and the form-factor made me curious. The diary is in some aspects superior to the Newtons, and the input is very fast. Also, I found the OS very well designed and extremely stable - you just start the machine up, once, and it just hardly ever fails. Very good battery life. Easy connectivity, especially with the Ericsson and Siemens mobile phones I owned at that time. By now, the email-client is outdated, though. The major drawback was the flimsy hardware. The display ribbon wears down after a year or two of heavy use, and as a result I have an assortment of dead Psions in my drawer. After that I tried the Psion 3mx (no touchscreen, but a backlit display). The interface - 1990's style - takes some gettin
g used to, but the machine is beautiful, and the diary is even more sophisticated than the Series 5's. Battery life is by far the best I've ever seen, but bear in mind that Psion's have no integrated flash memory. To keep your data safe, you need CF cards in the Series 5 and SSDs in the Series 3. Right now, I use a Nokia Communicator - basically, EPOC 6 (Symbian) combined with a mobile phone, bluetooth, IRDA & WiFi. It's great. For a look at what Psion could have been, see the collectables at www.pulster.de. Interestingly enough, after Psion's pullout from the consumer market the leading engineers went to TomTom and Apple; according to what I read, one of these guys is head of the iPod-Team, now.

One more thought: The best thing about Windows Mobile - which I also tried out for a few months - is Excel; that's about it. To my mind, the miniature Windows is cluttered and awkward to use, but that's my very personal view and I do not need its multimedia features.

Michael Manthey
Melatenguertel 92
50823 Koeln/Cologne - Germany
Home +49 (221) 5107445
Mobil +49 (163) 8670602
michael_manthey@magicvillage.de

Original Message:

From: "Andy Hill" <adhill@fastmail.co.uk>
Subject: [NTLK] Psion & jornada curiosity
Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2008 14:20:07 -0000

Hi there

From time to time I read comparisons on newtontalk between newtons and other pdas.

I wondered if anyone has or still does use a psion, (series 3 or 5) and how they compare.

====================================================================
The NewtonTalk Mailing List - http://www.newtontalk.net/
The Official Newton FAQ - http://www.splorp.com/newton/faq/
The Newton Glossary - http://www.splorp.com/newton/glossary/
WikiWikiNewt - http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
====================================================================
Received on Sat Jan 19 08:00:45 2008

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Mon Jan 21 2008 - 17:30:01 EST