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Of Psion and Symbian

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Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#41

Post by macdice »

I had various Psion models in the 90s. Several of the people involved in the design of those things went to do modern-ish devices with Psion series 5-style keyboards, including the Cosmo Communicator. I was curious enough to back the Astro Slide 5G project, which attempted to "reverse the clamshell" to make a device with Psion series 5-style keyboard that closes to resemble a modern standard all-screen rectangular slab. It appears to have gone horribly wrong during final manufacturing at a Chinese factory that closed down during COVID, with thousands of IndieGoGo backers not having received their Astro Slide devices after several years (I am one). A shame. Anyway this article shows the Psion 5 and the Communicator side-by-side. That's a way out of date device now running ancient Android on a slow CPU, and sadly the refresh project seems to have died on the vine :-(

https://www.zdnet.com/product/cosmo-communicator/

[Edited for typos]

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#42

Post by twothamendment »

I really loved my Series 5. That keyboard was awesome! I still have it, but the ribbon cable is broken.

I'd take a computer with a color screen, Bluetooth, running Linux and that keyboard - it could be fun for ham radio stuff.

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#43

Post by wvenable »

inglor_cz wrote: post #7

I 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 heterog…

By the time I worked on Symbian, devices were far more powerful than what the Symbian API was designed for (and this was still before the iPhone). It made you jump through hoops that you didn't need to jump through anymore. I wrote a wrapper around their "7 kinds of buffer" API that made it at least a little bearable.

The burning platform memo was entirely accurate although Elop probably shouldn't have Osborned his company with it.

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#44

Post by BirAdam »

lproven wrote: post #33
eduction wrote: post #23

> He was aware of both CPU and Sinclair Research, and he called them up. This is one of those sentences that make abortretry.fail articles feel slapped together from other sources without attribution. Who is “CPU” in this sentence? Context and a little digging reveals it is likely a reference to another early British company in the PC space, Cambridge Processor Unit Ltd. , described in the History section of the Acor…

Yes, that struck me, as well. I think he does a lot of cribbing from Wikipedia and does not acknowledge it. Online a few people have pointed out big holes in this story. Small ones, like the Organizer IIXP did not have a backlight: no Organizer model had a backlight, nor did the MC or the Series 3 or 3A. No mention of the Odin or Crystal phones. https://www.oocities.org/epoc_32/odin No mention of the RIM lawsuit (the…

Author here.

I don’t use Wikipedia at all.

Generally, I read old magazines, books, and occasionally old websites in the Wayback machine when I can’t find other stuff. I then write.

I don’t make citations as my work is meant to be neither authoritative nor academic. I research and write for my own enjoyment.

As for Davies, I didn’t bring him up because I didn’t have a ton of material on him. For Xchange, I again didn’t have a ton of material. For the games, that early period wasn’t my focus. I really wanted to read/write about their mobile hardware.

Now, for the backlight part, I will need to make a correction to my work. I recall reading it was present, but I was clearly wrong.

Edit: as for CPU, covered that on my site already: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/mips-for-the-masses

Edit 2: also, honestly, writing about anything in the UK is somewhat more challenging. I grew up in the USA. Unless people present did interviews I can find, or if I can find books/magazines about it… I won’t have much to go on as I’ll not have experienced it.

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#45

Post by e-_pusher »

hawski wrote: post #36

Sometimes I would like to have a small laptop with black and white screen or maybe 8 bit color that would have extreme (measured in days) or almost unlimited battery power (solar cell?). Something that would have a C compiler for happy hacking, though I would like to have a Linux kernel on it. I am not sure about connectivity though. We made huge efficiency and battery chemistry gains, but software is lacking. Though…

Check out this Android tablet, which would support running gcc through Termux I think.

https://daylightcomputer.com/

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#46

Post by mjg59 »

distances wrote: post #19
kmac_ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nokia not only missed what users wanted but also how developers would like to work. Symbian had a strange and easy-to-misuse API, poor manuals, and app deployments were tied to telecom operators as there was no app store. I remember my ramp-up as a developer with the Apple ecosystem after working with Symbian. It wasn't evolution; it was like a leap to the next century. The documentation was excellent, the APIs were…

That's not completely fair. Nokia was clearly well aware of the pains of Symbian development, and they bought Qt to improve that. Qt was used both for Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo in the last years. Especially QML for the UI parts was well ahead of the competition, giving declarative and hardware accelerated UIs with great dev convenience.

...and in the process forced the Maemo team to revamp everything again, delaying the shipping of an OS that didn't carry all of Symbian's terrible legacy, and ensuring that Nokia had nothing that was going to be competitive with the rest of the ecosystem (the follow-up to the N9 was heavily delayed because people got pulled back to get the N9 to ship on schedule, meaning there was going to be at least a two year window for everyone else to make progress while the new Nokia smartphone ecosystem stagnated)

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#47

Post by pacaro »

4ndrewl wrote: post #12
thesimp wrote: post #9

I 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 wit…

That would have been Autoroute. Written in the UK, the software house, Nextbase, was bought by Microsoft in 1993/94 and the Psion release was called "Microsoft Automap" - the only Microsoft release for that platform!

And yet... I worked for a small software company (STNC Ltd.) that was acquired by Microsoft in '99. One of our customers was Psion, and then Symbian, we definitely shipped releases to them after the acquisition, so there was (or could be) Microsoft software on the Psion

On a different not, my understanding was that Psion had paid Cygnus to work on Arm support for gcc. So essentially Psion was responsible for gcc having arm support.

The tool chain was bizarre, writing c++ in the Microsoft Visual C++ ide, and building with gcc. Which was crazy in the 90s

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#48

Post by isr »

macdice wrote: post #41

I had various Psion models in the 90s. Several of the people involved in the design of those things went to do modern-ish devices with Psion series 5-style keyboards, including the Cosmo Communicator. I was curious enough to back the Astro Slide 5G project, which attempted to "reverse the clamshell" to make a device with Psion series 5-style keyboard that closes to resemble a modern standard all-screen rectangular sl…

I feel your pain. I'm in the same boat as you (backed the astro slide - didn't get one).

I used the original Planet Computers device with psion-like keyboard, the Gemini, as my daily driver for a few years. The keyboard was no gimmick - it really felt like a quasi mini-laptop. A brilliant device, even considering the weak cpu (as compared to similarly priced phones)

Such a shame ...

(btw, had a psion 2, psion 3, psion 5 & sharp zaurus back in the day, so you can say I'm a sucker for these things)

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#49

Post by macdice »

isr wrote: post #48
macdice wrote: post #41

I had various Psion models in the 90s. Several of the people involved in the design of those things went to do modern-ish devices with Psion series 5-style keyboards, including the Cosmo Communicator. I was curious enough to back the Astro Slide 5G project, which attempted to "reverse the clamshell" to make a device with Psion series 5-style keyboard that closes to resemble a modern standard all-screen rectangular sl…

I feel your pain. I'm in the same boat as you (backed the astro slide - didn't get one). I used the original Planet Computers device with psion-like keyboard, the Gemini, as my daily driver for a few years. The keyboard was no gimmick - it really felt like a quasi mini-laptop. A brilliant device, even considering the weak cpu (as compared to similarly priced phones) Such a shame ... (btw, had a psion 2, psion 3, psio…

Surprisingly, they are still taking orders:

https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/astro-slide

I suppose this means that they still have a firm intention to produce eventually, hopefully even with an updated chipset given that the original parts are lost ("ODM is effectively unwilling to release remaining produced stock and the pre-purchased chipsets"!) Obviously you know all that, fellow backer, but just in case anyone else is interested in this debacle:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...

At this point I think of it as the Delorean of handheld computers...

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#50

Post by curiousigor »

When I got my dad's old Series 3a, it was one of the coolest things I ever saw. We had a computer at home, so I knew MS-DOS and then Win 3.1, but it was another thing to have a computer in your pocket!

Then, when I was in high school, my dad was developing applications for the national gas and water utility companies and they used Psion Workabouts with printer attachments, since they were rugged and basically only device approved for working in places with gas. He wanted to get out of the business, so he basically said if I would take over the devleopment and clients, which I did. I rewrote the code for the Psions and wrote an app in Visual Basic for windows machines (I cannot recollect which database I used) so they could download the client readings via the serial port and print it out.

I never really got into "professional" development after that, sticking mostly to product design, but I still like to dabble in code. I guess the thrill of working on a product from start to end and have it used by so many people still gets fills me with joy.

Fun times and to think that this has to be more than 20 years ago is crazy!

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