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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a troubled few months, Psion, makers of the world's finest (if a little long in the tooth) handhelds, have finally withdrawn from the consumer market, and now appear to be concentrating on the corporate market.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.
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