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New Psion Palmtop
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.
"
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.
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
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
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.
See info on Intel's web site.. 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'.
--Coke
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.
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
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.
Check it out at http://www.calcaria.net/ Linux looks pretty good on it. I am actually thinking of buying a Psion 5, but I can't find a supplier. :-(
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
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! ;)
--
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
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.
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!
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 for Psion software.
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.
Does this