[Leica] Psion - was "The worst insult..."

[rmcclure2 at woh.rr.com (Rob McClure)]

Hi Frank,

I never used a Psion but have had about every generation of Palm since 
the original Palm Pilot.  This has culminated with my current Treo 650, 
which is the Swiss Army Knife of PDA's, IMHO.  I am dreading the 
inevitable day when the Palm operating system is finally choked out of 
existence and I am forced to use the MS PDA operating system.  In my 
experience, MS PDA software is overbuilt and needlessly complex for 
people like me, who prefer the elegant simplicity and intuitiveness of 
mechanical cameras, watches, etc.

Regards,

Rob McClure

On Nov 23, 2006, at 3:33 AM, Frank Dernie wrote:

> Hi Didier,
> i have a Treo now and do much prefer the Palm to the portable Windows 
> OS. I did use my Psion as my portable computer, now I have to carry a 
> heavy one :-( I had the Psion 5 and 7 (or was that 9? - the book sized 
> one), I found the 5 screen too reflective and the 7 battery has died. 
> The thing I miss most is searching the address book. I have a terrible 
> memory for names but not numbers, on the psion typing in the area code 
> or part of an address, for example, would find the item, on the treo 
> only names are searched.
> I have to say that the one Mac OSX feature I miss most on my PC is the 
> search function Spotlight.
> Frank
>
> On 23 Nov, 2006, at 08:13, Didier Ludwig wrote:
>
>> It's not the price that kept me off choosing a Psion in the 
>> mid-90ies. They were just too big and overfeatured for a PDA. Most 
>> people deed not need to make rocket engineer calculations on their 
>> PDA. The top-line Palms costed almost as much, but were smaller and 
>> slimmer, and I always preferred the Palm's input system with 
>> touch-sensitive screen and writing stick to the Psion's small 
>> keyboard. Btw I still use a Palm (-phone, meanwhile).
>>
>> Psion has managed theirself out of the business with the leica-lab 
>> syndrome (to stay on topic), and by overseeing the trend that PDAs 
>> and cellphones are melting together. Instead of starting their own 
>> cellphone line (like Palm did with the Treo's), they went into a 
>> questionable strategic alliance with cellphone producers who let them 
>> fall after they sucked out their knowhow.
>>
>> But the Psion OS is still very popular for certain applications. What 
>> I know is that the train conductors in the swiss railways have 
>> Psion-driven portable computers with inbuilt printer and attached 
>> scanner-stick. They can print tickets on the fly, scan tickets on 
>> screens of cellphones (it's possible to order and pay a ticket by 
>> cellphone, getting it by MMS as a strip-coded attachment) and, of 
>> course, check the whole railway timetable. And what I call the 
>> "witches armed with a giant Psion" are the charming ladies who put 
>> parking tickets under your windshield wiper. They have a similar 
>> device like the conductors. And their tiny inbuilt printers work very 
>> well, I can tell...
>>
>> Didier
>>