Unwired View reports that Nokia has filed a patent for a very Psion Series 5-like hinged clamshell, which would seem to be ideal for a S60 Touch UI qwerty communicator. If I'm right then I'd guess we still won't see it for another year, but there's always my 2008 Christmas present to think about....
Read on in the full article.
Put a keyboard in it anywhere near as good as the Psion 5's, and it's definitely on my 2008 Christmas list too (or possibly 2009 birthday list??) 😃
Julie
The sketches ares sketchy, but based on the E90, I'd like to see that with an 800x600 touchscreen, and a 9500 style keyboard (oh and can we have a decent bundled word processor this time ffs!). If so I'm there with great big bloody bells on.
To me it looks like the successor to the N800 / N810. Still very promising!
I do sometimes wonder if it would have been better to add a phone stack to a Psion rather than put the Psion OS in a phone. We've been playing catch-up ever since.
It would be a nice successor to the E90. The N810 is very close and I really hope that product is the base for a new Communicator.
It's not a million miles from the just-released N810 internet tablet...
just before I took the plunge and got an E90 (from Ebay), I spent some time repairing a Psion 5MXpro....i was a little taken aback by how impressive that machine is some 10 years after it's birth, especially when you consider there is *no* portable keyboard that has ever approached the quality of the 5's.
The software too is very respectable still and if it had bluetooth, I may not have bothered getting an E90! We are all told that Series 60 has the Psion OS as it's basis, but it seems to me that they lost the good bits along the way.
I am very pleased with my E90, but if it was more of an updates Series 5, I would be even happier!
Psion still exists as a company, perhaps they could release updates of their classic software on Symbian (and other OSes too) as third party applications?
I sent a link to AAS about a month ago showing that Psion are now releasing Windows Mobile based smart phones, and I think if I remember correctly they had qwerty keyboards but they didn't look anything like an old Psion 5.
So I don't think we will be seeing anything Symbian from them again :icon13:
Psion have been producing windows CE based hardware for ages. It started when they aquired Technologix and have been producing items as Psion Technologix since, this is all that's left of Psion as the EPOC (Symbian) section was set up as a sepparate entity.
So in response to Krisse, as I understand it Symbian have all the EPOC software stuff, hence all the software on the Series 80 devices being a modification on the old EPOC stuff. But it seems these days it's easier to abandon than update and use someone elses software for the handset manufacturers.
So in response to Krisse, as I understand it Symbian have all the EPOC software stuff, hence all the software on the Series 80 devices being a modification on the old EPOC stuff.
So they sold the rights not only to the OS but also to the apps that came bundled with the OS?
Seems a bit odd (and a tragic shame) for that to happen if Symbian only intended to use the OS itself...
As you say though, handset makers seem to prefer doing the basic bundled apps themselves.
As I said the communicator series had some of the applications from the Psion devices, albeit in a somewhat modified form. They don't seem to have appeared on UIQ/S60 devices though and appear to have been dropped altogether with the new Communicator.
Problem is that while Symbian updated them, if only Nokia wanted to license the sofware and only for one device which is hardly a top seller, it's hardly worth the time to develop and push forward the software.
Part of the problem is perhaps that the code for the old Psion apps was VERY tightly written and probably very hard to maintain and push forwards by other, possibly less experienced programmers.
As a part time programmer myself, I can't even understand my own code from 5 years ago, so I can only imagine how a coder would feel today, presented with (say) Psion's word processor (or even that from the 9210/9500 on Symbian OS 7) and asked to bring it into line with a different interface, a different OS and different file formats.
You can see why sometimes companies start from scratch!