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

[rangefinder at screengang.com (Didier Ludwig)]

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





>the Psion Series 3 was by far the best PDA ever in my opinion,  
>instinctive software, beautifully made and functional. Killed by  
>cheaper less effective competition. Many people buy on price alone  
>and will never know what good value effective items are, even when  
>they are expensive. I have still never used a PDA as logical:-(
>A parallel theme to Leica in many ways actually.
>Frank