Of Psion and Symbian
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Of Psion and Symbian
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Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#2When I was just starting my career around the late 1980s, I wrote a program on the Psion for a chain store in the UK that had 21 stores. Basically a person would walk the aisles and enter the stock codes and quantities. When they were done they would plug the device into a serial device. I wrote this other program in MS Basic (DOS) that dialed up all these Psions and downloaded the orders into an IBM S/38 Order and Inventory management system. I thought I was the dog's. I loved those devices.
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#3Halcyon days ... interesting devices, ideas, and I loved my psion 5mx ... I remember hooking up to the internet while waiting in line at a concert and thinking I was damned business magnate cum console cowboy
I followed the story of Nokia, Symbian and Psion closely after that and the whole thing just felt like one of the biggest dropped balls in corporate history. Sad ... too many cooks, maybe ...
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#4I found my dad's Psion 5mx in a drawer the other day. They were really fantastic devices
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#5I often think about this article[1] from the Register that claim that the Paion MX5 was the last computer built by one team hardware and software.
[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2007/06/26/psion_special/
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#6For some reason I still love the Psion logo with the deconstructed letters and the industrial gray-yellow color scheme.
Anyway, it’s sad that there was such a massive opportunity for European corporate players to invent mobile computing, but together they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the form of Symbian (the evolution of Psion’s operating system, co-developed with Nokia and Ericsson).
The other day I was rummaging around papers in the attic, and found a black and white printout of an internal Nokia presentation from 2001 outlining their smartphone and mobile data strategy. It was striking how well they anticipated what users might want in the smartphone, but completely failed to project the technological milestones that might make those dreams realizable. The 2001 outlook was entirely obsessed with the limits of bandwidth and what mobile operators would allow on their network (i.e. how Nokia could enable operators to get a cut on all the content viewed by users).
Post-iPhone, it seems silly that they spent so much energy and engineering effort on shaving off a few kilobytes of 3G data here, squeezing apps into 1 MB RAM there, and so on. Apple was able to project the point where their desktop operating system (itself formerly a late-1980s workstation OS) could fit into mobile, and they also had the design capability to ruthlessly cut features to make that work. Nokia dabbled in all directions: bottom-up with Symbian, top-down with Maemo/Meego, but no commitment and no guiding vision except the managerial focus on cutting costs by putting the same old components a bit more cheaply into a growing range of colorful plastics.
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#7I wrote a lot of code for Symbian devices once.
The system was extremely efficient on low-powered machines (by which I mean both a slow CPU and a weak battery). As far as wringing maximum performance from hardware-that-be, I have never worked with a better system.
The learning curve of the API was insane, though (and the system dragged a lot of ancient pre-32-bit PSION/EPOC remnants within itself). So was the heterogenity of the devices. Every new device required some rewrite of existing apps, and Nokia pushed out dozens of them. On-device debugging mostly didn't work. Emulators were clumsy and bloated, but still lacked important APIs, such as sound.
At the end of the day, the system was so developer-unfriendly that everyone migrated happily to better pastures.
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#8For some reason I still love the Psion logo with the deconstructed letters and the industrial gray-yellow color scheme. Anyway, it’s sad that there was such a massive opportunity for European corporate players to invent mobile computing, but together they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the form of Symbian (the evolution of Psion’s operating system, co-developed with Nokia and Ericsson). The othe…
"Pocket Terminal 2002": https://imgur.com/gallery/pocket-terminal-2002-r2sq4i0
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#9I started with a Psion 3 and later a Psion 5MX and now 30 years later I still remember how good the user experience was. The agenda, de contact database, the way you could make your own database with data that you wanted to lookup while on the move, it all just worked. At some point in time I even had a mapping tool, I think the precursor to what is now TomTom.
Personally I think that today an only iphone/macbook with just the default software (mail/contacts/calendar/etc) comes somewhat close to the same user experience. A Windows machine, while having a million different programs available at your fingertips, does not feel as a cohesive user experience.
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#10> Symbian operated as a consultancy where they could take a reference design and adapt it to a customer’s hardware and give it a unique look and feel
If the author is referring to what I think he his, it was only a certain part of Symbian that did this. No other Symbian employees had access to that part of the building. Normal Symbian employees never actually got to see the phones that were being developed. All work their was done on an emulator (x86) and H2/H4 (armv5) reference boards.
This book details the politics that went on until the end https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smartphones-beyond-Lessons-remarkab...