Post by Paul StureWhat you say may well be true, but what killed Psion for me was hardware
quality control. 3 dead ones inside 18 months put me off.
PSION prematurely released the Series 5 so it could be ahed of
Microsoft's WinCE. It lacked about half of the prmomised features and
PSION promised to provide updates when the stuff became ready. What they
really did is just produce a demo of their EPOC32 operating system so it
could be sold to the mobile phone copmpanies who formed Symbian. But for
about 2-3 years, nothing came of it because PSION wanted to finish
EPOC32 for its PDAs while the mobile phone companies wanted to ditch
most of EPOC32 and just keep the kernel and put in the real stuff.
The PSION hardware was a really neat sleek design, but not robust
enough. My series 3 has had its hinges fixed many times, but the last
fix seems to hold. Epoxy resin and fiberglass strands carefully put to
hold the parts together :-)
PSION is so much like Digital. Great product, bad marketing. But in
hindsight, when Psion release the Series 5, they quickly dropped their
north american distributors, and didn't bother admitting that Palm was
aserious competitor. When Palm entered european markets (they had
already taken the north american markety), PSION simply widthdrew from
PDA market. My feeling is that PSION saw this coming while the series 5
was being developped and decided to simply get as much value as possible
for the OS and then quitly widthsraw from the market.
With the money they got from Symbian, PSION bought out a small canadian
firm called Teklogix which makes Microsoft based industrial handheld
devices. PSION is shutting down its support operation for its original
PDAs this June.
The user interface on the series 5 was pale in comparison to that of the
Series3, despite the fact it has touch screen. It was designed as a
showcase of the OS features. (so you had cascading menus to save the
file, cool looking, but not efficient). They also had an automated
feature to open the last opened document when you started an
application, and no way to exit without saving !!!!!
But the series 3 was an amazing piece of software packed into so little
footprint. Its proprietary networking was similar in functionlity to
that of DECNET. I was able to edit files residing on the macintosh from
the Series3 editor, and save them back as if they were local. Abd
having preemetive multitasking with different process priorities
(including non-prempted if priority is above 15) was pretty amazing for
a 80286 equivalent inside.
Post by Paul StureWhat I don't understand is that seemed to kill themselves off voluntarily.
Owner gave up and didn't want to give PSION to someone else. Think of it
as Olsen shutting down DIgital rather than handind it to Palmer and
knowing Palmer would ruin the company.
PSION was unwilling to compate aghainst palm and Microsoft, despite
having superior products. Sound familiar ?