Standing down today and retiring from his role as Chairman of Psion Teklogic is the spiritual Grandfather of Symbian OS, Dr David Potter. He founded Psion in 1980 with £70,000 of his own money, and over the next twenty years grew it to be one of the leading mobile computing companies, and in the process laid the Foundations for the current smartphone with the spinning out of Psion Computers as Symbian in 1999.
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Psion played a major role in creating the consumer mobile device industry. They created great products and showed people how computer technology could benefit them in every aspect of their lives. I still use my Revo Plus and Ericsson MC218 and the care and passion the Psion engineers had for usabe mobile devices is still very obvious. Even today 10 years after the introduction of the Psion 5, I have not found a better designed mobile computer.
I still have my Psion 3a and Revo and since then a Nokia 9300 and most recently a Nokia E71. I bought the series 3a as a personal organiser to replace the paper based Time Manger diary I was using at the time and for me, that�s the functionality that should be a given for a smartphone. Back then I remember dreaming of just carrying around one machine to replace the Psion and my (Nokia) phone. Seeing US colleagues with their blackberries for email and the Revo�s email option made me feel that all that was missing was a built-in phone.
So the current Nokia smartphones like the E71 should be my perfect machines, right? The only problem is that instead of taking the Psion Agenda and Contacts and improving on them, Nokia cut out all the richness and left the bare bones. And now every new piece of functionality seems to be about social networking where (as far as I can gather) everybody is obsessed with asking each other where they are and what are they doing. Well, my problem is that I don�t know what I'm doing because my �Personal Organiser� (E71) is so oversimplified that I�m constantly having to work round it!
Anyway, happy retirement David Potter, and thank you for some great machines. PS if you still have any contacts in Nokia PLEASE convince them to provide Psion level Data/Contacts and Agenda applications with categories et al!
I still have my own copy of Chequered Flag running under Speccy on my N82.
Why the epitaph? Anyone who ever met him and worked with him knows he was an evil and twisted old bastard who didn't give a shit about anything except his own money. Britain's own Mr. Burns more like.
If you miss the old days of the Psion Revo et al then I would suggest buying an N97 or N97 Mini. I have always wanted a successor to the Revo and I couldn't believe how much the N97 felt just like that when I used it!
And yes, it's a bit buggy but nowhere near as buggy as people say (IMHO)...
I started on a 3a, then a revo, then a 5mx, and another 5mx, before moving to my E90.
I totally agree with MJ Brown. My 3a and revo were incredibly competent diaries (the 5mx was just a tad too large for my pockets though). They were snappy - you flicked it open, hit the agenda short-cut, and you were flicking through your diary quicker than your colleague was flicking through their paper pages. Adding an entry was also quick. The system never slowed down - it just worked.
Bit of a disappointment then to switch to the E90. "what, next Monday?" you say as you open up the device and wait between 1 and 5 seconds for the display to redraw. Then you hit the calendar key (or in my case myown key) and wait a bit again. They you find your day, and start typing an entry. Another pause. And then some pauses while you're typing, too.
Sometimes it's ok, sometimes it's not, and I find my E90 incredibly useful in many other ways. But for typing and the calendar, the psion is still by far the winner.
When will someone understand what we want?!