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Psion Chucks In The Towel For Consumer Devices
chuckT writes: "After a troubled few months, Psion, makers of the world's finest (if a little long in the tooth) handhelds, have finally withdrawn from the consumer market, and now appear to be concentrating on the corporate market. I switched to a 5mx a while ago, having used Palms, and loved the Psion. A beautifully thought out machine, I particularly liked OPL (the bundled BASIC-like language) and the fold-out keyboard. They had a real opportunity to be as successful as Palm, but somehow, being a British company, managed to cock it up. Bloody typical." Besides the loss of 250 jobs as Psion, this also sounds like a blow to Bluetooth, which Psion's CEO calls "late on the uptake and much smaller than anticipated" in the BBC piece.
I have owned a Psion Series 4, Psion Revo and I currently own a Psion 5mx.
They are fantastic machines, albeit with limitations, but they fill a market niche that nobody has a sensible entrant in: Handheld devices with usable keyboards!
I hate palmtops that you need to write on (graffiti, normal handwriting, whatever). I have bad handwriting, I'm very slow at it. I hate having to write things by hand. Notes, diagrams, pictures, sure. Entering in a name and address, the details for a meeting, etc, I want to use a keyboard - it's quicker and more accurate.
Plus the psions were very capable machines - ok, the version of Doom was limited; the speccy emulator rocks, nethack is fantastic (and you have a keyboard so its playable) and there is a lot of other stuff out there.
I wont go into why Psion didn't get market domination - other people are making that point very well. I am just disappointed that they didn't get a sufficiently large market share to justify additional R&D and continue to bring out innovative and cutting edge technology that makes me feel good as a gadget freak and also prove useful in my daily life.
~Cederic
Simple answers - lack of investment, and lack of overseas emphasis. America's typically had plenty of ppl willing to invest in non-blue-chip, whereas it's very difficult to get startup or continuity investment in Britain, simply bcos the banks and venture capitalists historically didn't want to invest locally. Paul Dyson, for instance, had to go to Japan to get funding. And the government hasn't helped - they're quite happy to give multi-hundred-million-pound bribes to large overseas companies to get inward investment, but they've never thought that the money would be better used to kickstart _British_ businesses.
Add to that the fact that Psion's not been heavily promoted outside Europe, and it all falls apart. As with VHS and Betamax, the product which won was the one with the better marketing, not the one with the technical superiority.
Grab.
I just got my Nokia 9210 phone - and it actually comes quite close to whtat you describe:
:-)
1. Phone
2. Internet connecting (GSM-Modem)
3. Browser/Email/WAP/SMS/Fax
4. IR camera connection
5. MultiMediaCard slot for memory etc..
6. Wordprocessing/spreadsheet etc.
7. RealPlayer/video player
8. Very nice C++ (or Java) API
9. High Speed GSM (42.3 Kbps)
10.Big bright color screen (Very cool!)
11.Long battery life
12.All the usual PIM stuff, contacts calendar etc
But you need GSM network - and you Americans are a bit behind on GSM
For a long time, Psion had the handheld market sewn-up. Sure, it had competitors like Casio and Atari (remember the Portfolio anyone?) but no one who really had a well-rounded, well-supported product with either a software- or user-base to match.
But the one area the Psion was weak in was connectivity. Out of the box, you could not connect a Psion to a PC or a Mac, which meant all those names, numbers and address had to be entered manually. Eventually, the company released connectivity kits that allowed users to exchange data between their devices and their PCs. But at £50/$80 or so, these weren't exactly great value for money.
Then US Robotics came along with the Pilot, which, after various model revisions and name changes, became the Palm. Now, fuctionwise, this new handheld didn't do anything that any other handheld could do - to-do list, calendar, calculator, contacts, notes. But what it did do was connect to and exchange data with PCs very easily. At the touch of a button no less, out of the box
Meanwhile, Psion happily trundled on ignoring the fact that the market had changed and that users now expected PC connectivity at no extra cost. Rather than bundling the necessary cable and software (cost to them perhaps £10/$15), they carried on with the same business model.
Now when you have a monopoly (or near monopoly) you can ignore the market like this and just do what you want. When you don't, you have to watch the rest of the herd and, sometimes, follow them.
Psion didn't, sales dropped, the Symbian alliance lifeboat sank, and the rest is history.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
He was so embarassed by the results that after the 3a owner showed him what he had typed, he wouldn't admit how he had done and refused to reveal his results.
Styluses are sexy - tiny keyboards aren't. The 3a could be folded up and put in your pocket despite the keyboard, and the Psion display form-factor facilitated really good spreadsheet work (which it came with). For businessmen and women on the go, it was an excellent tool for keeping track of your expenses, etc. As a consultant at the time, I actually used mine to generate invoices (it could be plugged directly into any HP printer).
As a pre-cursor to Palm, and containing all of this cool technology, why didn't it rule the PDA world? Same old story:
- Poor marketing in it's biggest potential market - the U.S. and Canada
- No manufacturing facilities in N.A. kept the price too high
- Poor distribution channels in N.A.
Lesson learned: If you have cool technology that you want to be successful, you have to build it in N.A., market it in N.A., and sell it in N.A.Q.E.D.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
This is a real shame for the handheld market. Psion were leaders in this industry (in the UK at least, where for ages they basically owned the market, without the need for StrongARM [ahem] tactics).
Psion machines exude quality at all levels, the clam-shell cases are masterpieces of engineering, the satisfying slide as they open really does have to be felt to be believed, and EPOC is without a doubt a killer OS. (It's my #2 favorite, closely followed by whatever the Spectrum ran was called). There is no better way to idle the time away while sat on a train or bus than a quick game of Cascade on my Revo (that's one of the original ones, not the RevoPlus) or rattling off a few thoughts in the jotter or word processor.
That leads nicely to the keyboard, I never cease to be impressed at how easy it is to type on such a small keyboard, and sitting in a coffee house with a huge cappucino that dwarfs the computer you're furtively typing away at results in the most amazing puzzled looks from other caffeine consumers.
I'm just very, very glad that EPOC will continue in the form of the Symbian partnership, and that Psion will no doubt emerge as leaders in whatever is the next big growth area. If they could make the jump from the producer of some of the greatest computer games of the early 80's to producer of the best handhelds, I am sure they will be one of the best at whatever they next turn their collective hands to.
250 jobs lost is always a tragedy, I just hope that the people concerned find that with the skills they have, they are able to find alternative employment very soon.
--
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
Now, I count on my Revo for the next 3 years (ouch, synchornization software might become hard to find! Damnit!), but after that? I hope there will be *good* alternatives then. I mean with build in spreadsheet (I use that all the time, and Palms do not have it *by default*), and preferably with a keyboard. I tried Palms, even tough grafitti is fun, it cannot be used to write a 3 page email. (Yes, I do that, and yes I check email with my Psion by using my cellphone)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Television - John Logie Baird (Scottish)
Computers - Babbage, Turing (tho' Pascal, Aiken, Eckert & Mauchly et al all could be considered 'inventors of the computer')
Facsimilie, or Fax - Alexander Bain (Scottish)
Holography - Dennis Gabon (English)
Penicilin - Alexander Fleming (English)
Railways - George Stephenson (English)
Jet Engines - Frank Whittle (English)
Hovercraft - Christopher Cockerell (english)
Tanks - E.D. Swinton (English)
And we are leaders in.. err.. none of the above. Us Brits are ideas people, but we're a bit crap at actually carrying things through to the end.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
It's unfortunate, but thats reality.
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
This seems to be the way that British hardware companies develop. There is a close parallel between Psion moving from hardware (the 5mx, Revo, etc) to intellectual property (via Symbian), and the fate of Acorn.
To those of you that haven't been in a British school in the last 15 years - Acorn used to be the main supplier of computers to educational establishments, with the BBCs in the early 80s, and the Archimedes in the late 80s, early 90s. Being British, the Archimedes was an incredible ground-breaking mass-market system which absolutely no-one bought: it was the system the original ARM chip was designed for (indeed, ARM used to mean 'Acorn RISC Machines'). The Archimedes, which came out in 1987, had a 32-bit, graphical, multi-tasking operating system with the best version of Basic I've used used.
Luckily, they were better at marketing the ARM chip than they were in marketing the actual computer - ARM was spun off at a seperate company, and is now worth much much more than Acorn ever was. Much of the money ARM makes comes from licensing it's designs to other companies.
Similarly, Psion designed achingly wonderful handheld machines (I bought a Psion 5 when it came out. Recently, it ran for 44 hours on a pair of ordinary AA batteries). Incredible battery life, wonderful keyboard, very well designed OS (Epoc), integrated programming language. Now it looks like Psion the hardware company will fade away, and Symbian the software company will grow.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
The C++ compiler you use for developing EPOC applications is GNU C. Is that free enough? You can download the SDK from here: http://www.symbiandevnet.com/
The only drawback is that it assumes that you are developing on a M$ platform.
If only Symbian could make the EPOC OS open source. Then it would really take off! The EPOC OS is really good and beats PalmOS easily. But I'm afraid that Symbian would rather just stop developing the OS than making it Free. Sigh.
)9TSS