If you would like to contribute or send in an article please do- hopefully I will be able to produce versions that run on your PDA over time. Doc and iSilo versions will be available for each article and you will be able to read them direct from the web site but it would be nice to bundle them together in a PDA friendly format so that you can carry articles with you. PS. Watch out for my book 'Angel' which will be released soon. Thanks Shaun McGill
Click the image
on the left to view the mobile edition Click the images on the
left to view the archived articlesTECHNO-LUST AND PALM COMPUTING (08/07/03)
Last week in this space, Clie columnist Shaun McGill saw a woman using a PDA for the first time since having this column for 18 months, posed the question, "Where are all the women PDA users?"
Though
a couple of us have responded, I suspect, Shaun, there are fewer women users of
PDAs than men because of something I call the "Techno-Lust Syndrome"
(TLS).TLS is the term I coined to describe the chronic condition that afflicts many more modern males than females. I haven't determined this by any sort of official poll or survey mind you, but rather by observation. This is a condition that rears its head with the advent of every "must have" gadget onto the market. If your hands start to sweat when you see the new wireless phone models that not only do e-mail, but surf the Web, take color pictures, play games AND text message with 100 of your closest friends, you might have Techno-Lust. If that six month old 3 megapixel digital camera seems pathetic next to the 5 (and just around the corner, 6 megapixel) models, and you hardly bat an eye at the $999 and beyond price tag, you might have Techno-Lust. If any kind of a rebate offer causes your checkbook to itch, and you begin to talk yourself into all kinds of reasons why it would be wise to take advantage of this deal NOW, you just might have Techno-Lust.
Men, on the whole, tend to be much better acquainted with this syndrome than women, for we are more likely to be resistant to its effects. I suspect it's probably that TLS is, like color-blindness or hemophilia, a sex-linked disease. Men are generally the ones who suffer from their manifested effects, while women merely pass the trait from one generation to the next. However, I am NOT one of those women, for like my male compatriots, I am severely afflicted with TLS.
It was in the '80s, the early age of personal computing, that I discovered this about myself. My husband and I leased a Compaq Deskpro (640k RAM a huge 20MB hard drive!) for our fledgling service business, but I swore that I'd do very well with just a typewriter, thank you very much. After a couple of tentative starts, I had managed to turn the thing on and find my way around, eventually discovering among the eccentricities of DOS, EDLIN, its infamous line editor.
We purchased a program called "Framework" (a Lotus 1-2-3 clone and rather elegant for its day). One afternoon while fiddling with a feature in the word processor that was supposed to enable me to insert a couple of paragraphs of text with a two-key shortcut, I could not get the darn thing to work. After trying the procedure over and over, calling tech support a couple of times, scrupulously combing the documentation for any clues, at last a third phone call to the help line finally yielded the answer: there was a conflict between the two-key shortcut and a TSR (terminate and stay resident) program that loaded at boot up.
I suppose just the fact that I spent all that time pursuing this problem separates me from millions out there (men AND women), who would have chucked the whole thing before spending hours trying to track down this arcane problem. But having grown up around a dad who tinkered and liked to do things "the right way," I was primed to be a perfectionist from childhood. So all my detective work into this mysterious problem triggered my latent tendencies to TLS. I got hooked into the world of computers -- Techno-Lust was here to stay.
By the time the Palm Pilot came out in 1996, I was a
prime candidate for one. I'd been using a Sharp PDA (those forerunners of the
Zaurus), and the simplicity and elegance of the Pilot by contrast looked
beautiful. Its primary attraction, and biggest selling point was its one-button
sync capability with a PC. I had tried to kludge this with my Sharp, but was
never satisfied with the results. When at last I secured a Personal Palm,
installed it, and ran the sync program, it worked AS ADVERTISED! I was a
goner.And now seven years and four Palms later, here I am. My current model is a Handspring Visor Pro with 16 MB of RAM. Its monochrome display looks pretty anemic next to the rainbow wonders out there, and as the eyes are a tad less sharp than they used to be, a crisp, bright screen is now a must-have, and the Sony Clie SJ33, or the TG50 are the models I'm considering. I guess my degree of TLS affliction has somewhat waned over the years, as looming college tuition bills render me unable to justify paying $800 bucks for the NZ90 …
I look forward to contributing to this column on a semi-regular basis, my experiences and observations of the computing scene, and the PDA world. So watch this space for my first reviews, among which will include some venerable programs in the Palm catalogue: DDH Software's HanDBase, and Blue Nomad's Palm word processor, Wordsmith.
And any of you ladies (or guys) have comments, feel free to drop me an email at writenlaff@yahoo.com.
Nancy Hurst
OS666 (30/06/2003)
I have been reading some articles recently which talk about the possibility of multi-tasking in Palm OS6 and a few people have gotten very excited about this but may I be so bold as to say that this is exactly what the Palm OS does not need.
If you have used Palm and Pocket PCs you may know what I mean by this. My experience of the Pocket PC OS and its machines has not been good; indeed it has been a bit of a joke. I have owned a couple of Casio's, an iPaq, a Toshiba and an HP Windows CE machine of which all were very unstable and crashed at least once a day but this is not the reason why the Palm OS does need multi-tasking (saying that I'm convinced it would make it a lot less stable).
The problem lies in the size of the screen on an ordinary PDA- it would be nice to have a decent linking system between the core and third party apps to allow docs to be inserted in datebook and contact entries, spreadsheets in docs and sketches in contacts but why on earth would we want to be running multiple applications at one time?
It's not as though you can see both at once and even if you could they would be so small as to be worthless. Whilst it would be nice to copy a piece of text and hit a key combination to paste into another app again it's unlikely you would want to do this often due to the inherent input restrictions of a portrait style PDA. Maybe someone reading this can give me some good reasons why multi-tasking would be beneficial (email) but I just can't see it.
I use the Palm OS every day and even though I have installed 100's of apps and games (for the site) it has been relatively stable with only 3 hard resets in the past year. It's interesting that my last PPC managed 5 full resets in one week.
So, my perception is that multi-tasking and a more complex OS will lead to a loss of reliability and will kill off the Palm OS we currently know and love.
BUT is there hope? The Psion's had multi-tasking, a complex OS and so many great features yet they were and still are the most stable machines I have ever used. I have never had a full reset in 10 years of using them and can only remember a handful of soft crashes. Obviously a multi-tasking OS works 10 times better on a keyboarded machine as I am rediscovering with my new Psion series 7.
The really good news is that Psion may well be coming back into the PDA market! I have heard some pretty strong rumours (not in forums) that they are working on 2 new machines and one will be a Palm/PPC shaped device whilst the second will be a Revo sized keyboarded, colour machine.
If the above proves to be true then there is hope that we will be able to use solid as a rock, multi tasking PDAs for a while yet- that is not a phrase that applies to the PPCs and possibly not to Palm OS6 (who knows?)
The above image was made by a VERY big name in the Palm community who chose to remain anonymous.
Royal Hell (the conclusion) 26/06/2003)
This is not meant as a full article but as so many of you emailed re my eBay saga I thought I would let you know the finishing twist.
My parcel arrived on my doorstep this morning!!!
The box was a bit battered but everything inside was OK and the Royal Mail had somehow managed to get it back- it contained a couple of faxes from them to Indonesia urging return and it worked.
I feel just a bit guilty about my comments in the last article now and must thank Julie Martin who had been checking everyday to see where it was- who said British Companies were no good? (oh yeah- that was me:))
All in all it took 4 weeks to sort out but I have learned the following lessons:-
1/ NEVER send items abroad if payment received via PayPal for an auction- if it's not one of their registered addresses you have no protection as a seller when they reverse the payment.
2/ Get cash or personal cheque/money orders as payment for goods if possible.
3/ If a Mr Virman of Villa Taman Cibodas, Tulip 3 street, Blok O3, 10 Tangerang, 15138, Indonesia (email: freebandwidth@mailc.net) buys your product on eBay or any other auction site tell him to p*ss off!:)
Here's the ladies! (25/06/2003)
Nancy (23/06/2003)
I thought I would post a couple of responses received to the 'Where are all the ladies?' article:-
I have just visited your site, Clie Planet, for the first time. (Looking for reviews on various Clie models). I am a long-time PDA user (beginning back with a Palm Personal, which had 256k memory). I have since owned a Visor Deluxe and currently have the Visor Pro (16 MB) model, and am planning to upgrade to a color model Palm sometime this year. I am looking hard at the Clie SJ30 (or whatever will be the equivalent model by the time I purchase). I like the Palm OS and plan to stick with it.
I am upgrading to color because it's easier on the eyes, and is way cooler than B&W....... also it sports the memory stick slot - I do a lot of writing and save several versions of my docs on my Palm - having a way to archive them would be outstanding.
I also like the size of the Clie - smaller, more compact, which means it will take less space in a purse - and that's always a plus, as I'm a mom, and my purse tends to become everyone's suitcase if I have one that's too big...!
You asked about ways we women use the Palm. (I don't use either one of the apps you mentioned...) I imagine they are similar to the guys, but like many women who are wives and mothers, I manage our ENTIRE family calendar on my PDA. My husband tries to keep track on his, but he forgets to put stuff in it. But I put all the activities for my kids (two, boy and girl - high school) on my PDA, so we can manage all our divergent schedules. I work part-time work, my son drives and my daughter will be getting her license this month. So coordinating vehicles and transportation schedules is also big chore made much easier by my PDA. Of course doctor and dentist appointments all go in my Palm as well.
Activities I do for myself include classwork management (I have an app called "Yesterday" which I use for this purpose), as I have taken online college courses and it helps me keep homework, tests and chat schedules for classes. I also use an app called HanDBase, which allows me to create my own little databases. I have three or four that I use constantly - a passwords DB, an ID db, a bank and credit card DB, and a domain manager DB - I manage a couple of websites and this DB helps me keep track of web passwords, expiration dates, IP addresses, etc etc.
I mentioned that I write - I use the Targus portable keyboard -- I've typed school papers and letters, using it while flying back and forth to California from the Midwest (a four hour flight!). Wordsmith is my Palm wordprocessor of choice. I have seen that Targus is coming out with a wireless version of its keyboard, and I'm glad, because in upgrading to the Clie, I wouldn't want to give up this functionality.
I have played a couple of games on my Palm, most notably SubHunt. My daughter always tried to steal my Visor so she could play, but when I had the battery-only units, I was loathe to let her have it, as she could drain them in one sitting. When I upgraded to the Visor, SubHunt didn't run properly all the time - locked up the Palm, and I got out of the habit of playing. I have since deliberately avoided downloading games, because I could waste lots of hours playing if I did. I'm a PC gamer from way back, playing such titles (with my son) as Wing Commander (the DOS version!!), XWing, Duke Nukem, Dark Forces - yea, we even played Doom and Quake....). Warcraft II was a favorite of ours, and recently for his high school graduation I bought him "Freelancer," because it reminded us both of "Privateer," a GREAT game put out by Origin a few years back. (Same guys who did the ground-breaking "Wing Commander" game).
Most women of my acquaintence could care less about technology -unlike myself, they don't like it just for technology's sake, but only if it can do something useful for them. Many of them see no need to switch from their paper calendar (which is what I originally went with a Palm to manage), as it works well for them. If they otherwise have a computer, their kids usually know more than they do, but not always. If they encounter trouble with their home computers, they call me. I love to fix things (was taught by my dad), and would rather play with computers than shop for clothes - so I guess that makes me an anomaly.... My husband and I ran a small business for almost 20 years (which we sold 2 years ago), and we had a 10 station computer network running one server, equipped with MS Small Business Server. Those years we had the network, I increased my knowledge of all things computing quite a bit, as I was the only one in our office remotely capable of keeping it in running order!
Mary (20/06/2003)
Interesting article... I've certainly noticed the lack of women on ClieSource and other sites. Did you know though, that there is a VERY busy yahoogroups called PDAWomen? I think that's the name of it, and I'm assuming it's still active. Men would probably go nuts on it, as it does not stay at ALL on topic and is very chatty. It was too much for me, I stick with boards that I can read at my leisure. I think that the low numbers of women on sites is actually the combo of 1 and 2. Fewer women tend to buy PDAs, and those that do usually go for the lower end models and don't spend hours a day playing with them. I obviously am a tomboy in this respect, since I tend to upgrade my PDA frequently, load new software all the time, and visit Clie sites on a daily basis. And even made the Hall of Fame at Memoware for my contributions! I definitely love gadgets and am always the first person I know a lot of times to get the latest toy (not just PDAs either, I just got a new desktop AND laptop computer, high-end digital SLR camera, 2 1gig CF cards, etc.)
Thank you ladies:)
Where are all the ladies? (20/06/2003)
The other day for the first time in my life I spotted a lady using a Palm PDA at work! It was at work and it surprised me that it had not happened before as I often see guys prancing around with their styluses:)
In the 18 months that Clie Planet has been running I have received emails from no more than 10 women which is incredible considering I get over 200 emails every day. There's two possible reasons for the seeming lack of female PDA users:-
1/ There isn't many. This I doubt though and here's some good examples why- FemDays is a menstrual pocket calendar for the Palm OS which has received almost 8,000 downloads at PalmGear alone, MenstrualTrac has been downloaded almost 2,000 times and MS Woman an incredible 81,740 times as of yesterday!!!
2/ Unlike men they just do not get excited by a piece of technology. My guess is that a woman is much more likely to use their PDA for useful activities than to play games, download 100's of application and are much less likely to become attached to it. It's interesting how so many technical writers are female, 2 examples being the much missed Debbie Barham and Kate Bevan who writes for the FT. Is it simply that when a woman does become attached to something she tends to do something constructive with her new interest and is more likely to make a living from it rather than a man who will just talk endlessly about it and play games when he has some spare time?
So ladies- which is it? I would be interested in hearing how you use your PDAs and to see what is different in your usage compared to PDA Man. Also, it will be useful as research for my new book because one of the guiding factors is that the PDA is bought by woman as well as men and you may be able to give me an idea of how to complete chapter 14:)
Email: webmaster@clieplanet.com
If you read my article called Royal Hell! (which is here) you will be interested to know the final chapter of the whole sorry story. They did manage to lose the parcel and deliver it to the guy with the stolen credit card in Indonesia and sent me a compensation cheque for .... wait for it... £48 which is just over 10% of the item's value. Only problem is they spelt my name wrong on the cheque so I can't cash it anyway until they send another one- doh!
This comment in their letter made me chuckle though- "From the feedback you have kindly provided, it is clear that we are not always giving an acceptable quality of service to our customers. I can assure you that your comments have been noted and appropriate action will be taken." Roughly translated that means: we are a typical big British company who has no idea about customer service and are so under pressure to turn a profit that your problem is no big deal:)
Anyone out there know the law and think it's worthwhile taking this further? Email: webmaster@clieplanet.com
How can I help? (19/06/03)
I have received many emails concerning the article below and a lot of you have offered to help add content to the site, write reviews and generally offer encouragement to Clie Planet as a whole.
Well, there has been some talk of Clie Planet's 'problems' on various forums and I'm not quite sure how that happened? There is no current problem- the news content is more frequent and of a higher volume than ever, David Eaton has spent the last few months writing reviews (and possibly sleeping now and then), Bert has been working hard on a site update for Clie Planet which is hopefully close to being revealed and I very much get the feeling from people that they are happier than ever with the way the site is running.
It's true to say that I am planning for when our second child arrives and am questioning the amount of time it takes to run the site. If you want to help there are some things you can do and they don't all involve writing lengthy reviews and spending hours in front of your PC:-
News snippets, reviews
and competition entries are always useful and really do help lessen the time
required searching for news and adminstering the site Click on one of the
adverts on Clie Planet or purchase a piece of software from the 'Special Offers'
section Use the PayPal link on
the front page if you so wish- no one expects a fortune through donations but
even $2 helps towards hosting costs etc. Send in your ideas for
ways to improve the site or make a post on the forum Finally, even a positive
email to people like David Eaton really makes a difference and helps to remind
us why we are doing thisSadly Sony are unable to offer support for the site (or any other 3rd party site?) but I have to take this opportunity to thank Seidiowho are doing a lot of work to help Clie Planet and have been very encouraging over the past few weeks.
There are some new features coming up including a full software store, a complete new section which is being looked at by Clark and some others which are still to be decided.
We will keep this going for as long as we can and your support (no matter how you show it) really is appreciated:)
Planet People (14/06/2003)
I regularly receive emails complimenting me on Clie Planet and asking how I manage to keep it updated every single day along with PDAThoughts, the eBook 'PDA' and Syncronized Magazine. The truth is it's not easy and would be impossible without the following people:-
Bert Austin
(yes, that really is Bert Austin!)
Bert runs designsbybert and designed the current Clie Planet, he spent countless hours building graphics, coding the site and checking with me as to my requirements. He has always been there right from the early days and proved to be one of the most responsive and helpful developers when I was starting out. What has he asked for in return? Nothing at all.
David Eaton
David approached me a while back to ask if he could write some reviews for Clie Planet. Obviously I said yes and a few months later he has produced over 50 reviews and almost 20 Clie Connections articles. I am constantly amazed at the dedication he shows to his work and his ability to sum up the relative merits of a piece of hardware or software in a way in which we can all understand. What has he asked for in return? Nothing at all.
Michelle Ionta
Michelle has been an email buddy for a long time. We have spent many hours arguing about George Bush, Iraq and the differences between the British and the Americans and somehow still remained friends:) She has answered hundreds of ClieQueen support emails for Clie Planet and very rarely has to ask me for advice with a tech question- she is an encyclopaedia of all things Clie and extremely generous with her time. What has she asked for in return? Nothing at all.
Clark Fralick
Clark is a teacher who became involved in Clie Planet near the beginning. If there's a design competition he's there with something brilliant- see Jason Goldman's logo and his Pixel Painter skins. He also set up the Help Allison Fund, which raised a lot of money for one of his pupils who had cancer. If I ever need a graphic for the site he always manages to find the time between his job and family to help me out. What has he asked for in return? Nothing at all.
chunlin
I know very little about this man except that he constantly bombards my email account with interesting and off the wall news items. If it's a slack news day up he pops with something no other site has and he has been responsible for quite a few Clie Planet scoops. What has he asked for in return? Nothing at all.
Lee and Kenny
Lee and Kenny spent many months emailing me every day and whilst this has trailed off a bit recently they are still there hitting me with great news when it happens. What have they asked for in return? Nothing at all.
Joel (fireball)
Joel is the man who adds the news to Clie Source and has been a constant source of help right from the start. There has never been any real competition between our sites and it's nice to see that after all this time we are both still going (dare I be arrogant enough to say still the biggest Clie sites around:))
Many others
There are many other people who I have not named who produce news, enter competitions and write reviews and articles from time to time and help to make Clie Planet a better place.
So, why name these people now? It's because I feel that Clie Planet has lost some of its community feel and that's partly my fault. The competitions have been few and far between as have the interviews with big names from the Palm world and I will be putting that right straight away. The amount of news articles, hints and tips and reviews I receive on a daily basis has decreased quite a lot though over recent months and believe me it really does help when I have only a spare 30 minutes to update the site every day if I have content waiting for me:) If you want to help just drop me a line at webmaster@clieplanet.com.
Regarding the question of how I manage to keep motivated enough each day to update the site which I receive a lot I have to say that there are days when I really can't be bothered to keep it running but it's usually followed by a day with a new idea and off I go again.
Another question I get a lot is simply 'Why do it?' That's more difficult to answer. Do I make a lot of money from the site? No- I estimate that I am down over £1,000 in Clie Planet's first 18 months. Do I get lots of freebies from Sony and other developers? Not really. I guess I could probably get free registration codes to almost any Palm program if I asked and have received cases and accessories for review purposes, which is a nice bonus. What I have had from Sony? Um... A T625 to review 5 months after they were released, 4 marketing people ringing me on one day asking me to remove NX70 details because the machine was too far from release and the promise of a TG50 to review in about a month even though it has been available in the UK for quite some time (all review machines have to be returned). I guess you could say that Sony have been completely unforthcoming when it comes to proactively offering help- it's as if the site does not exist until I release information which I should not have. The one bright point was Sony UK giving a new Clie to the Help Allison Fund, which was a nice gesture.
I'm not asking for violins to be brought out by the way:)
The final question I get asked a lot is 'How long will you keep this up?' Obviously this is impossible to answer but suffice to say I would be surprised to see Clie Planet last throughout 2003. There are a number of reasons for this- we are expecting our second child in January 2004 and so time will be even more precious than now. Whilst I am proud of Clie Planet and all that it has done it's not really benefiting me in any practical way- I enjoy writing about technology and may look to concentrate on using this in the form of serious writing in the future. Finally, it's a very difficult process to keep a site new and original and even though Clie Planet is updated 'every' day it always needs a new angle to get noticed.
If you want to comment on this article either drop me an email or visit the forum.
The Ideal Machine by John Shibley (10/06/03)
I've thought about the ideal device too. I think you're right in thinking modular, but you need to go even farther than smaller versions of current devices and separate the basic components of a computer.
There are two physical interfaces to consider. The first is input. Right now the fastest, most reliable input device is the keyboard, and until that changes no ideal device will be able to be smaller than a good keyboard, which is probably somewhere around the size of your Psion.
The second interface is visual output, what we now know as the screen. The limit there is legibility versus what I would call transparency - that is, the ease of switching one's attention from the screen to something else. You could have a small screen very close to your eyes (like a visor) but not be able to look at something else very easily.
Each of these limits is being explored and I think within 5 years we'll see breakthroughs in each.
The input device that has the most potential of breaking the keyboard monopoly is the microphone. If voice recognition was as accurate as typing, and if correcting errors could be made as simple as it is on a keyboard, the input device could be reduced to a microphone suspended from one's ear, like some cell phones have already.
The output device that looks most promising is some version of the "screen as eyeglasses" devices. I already see some avatars of this on the market: Look here for instance. Or here.
So, the smallest input/output pairing that is on the horizon is good enough voice recognition through a small mic and eyeglass centered monitoring.
Which leaves us with the third component, the CPU. These are already profoundly small - I bet that the limit on Palm devices is the smallest acceptable screen, not the size required to house the CPU.
So in the future you may have different magnitudes of CPU that you marry to the input/output pairing above, with the power of the CPU being driven by the tasks needed. At home there might be CPU the size of a shoe box under the bed, plugged into the wall and a cable modem with wireless communication between CPU and input/output device (can anyone say WiFi?).
When traveling you'd slip a Palm device into your pocket or briefcase. Most of us, I'd bet, would rarely need anything larger than a Clie, which if devoted completely to CPU power would probably be adequate to most tasks. Storage would be on Compact Flash, with OS and basic software on ROM.
All these technologies exist now. These are a few of the limits I see:
Eyesight damage from long term use of the eyeglasses.
Social acceptance of offices characterized by low voices rather than the clack of keyboards.
Ethical conundrums. Are people using devices like this androids yet? If an android is a hybrid person/machine, is a new generation of knowledge workers & players so equipped a bastardization of what it means ot be human, or an interesting mutation??
Of course, we already tolerate the transformation of people into androids to extend the life or usefulness of the person. A human being with an artificial hip, a pacemaker or hearing aid is clearly android if we take the definition at all seriously. But these devices only preserve normal human function, not extend it, as the device described above would.
You can't sell a PDA on it's own (09/06/03)
Whilst doing some reserach for my book I noticed a strange pattern which applies to manufacturers of PDAs. It seems to me that a company which sells PDAs as their main product up to this time has little chance of surviving.
Of all of the manufacturers who have PDAs as their core business I can only think of one company who has managed to survive in tact and keep their PDA business alive and that's Palm. It would be fair to say though that thy are on shaky ground.
Examples of companies who have moved away from the PDA business include Handera, Handspring, Psion, Geofox and Oregon Scientific.
Compare this with the number of manufacturers who still make PDAs when they represent a tiny part of their business such as Sony, HP, Toshiba, Sharp, Casio and Dell. It's interetsing to note that this applies to the OS side as well- Microsoft can survive if the Pocket PC format died tomorrow but Palm would struggle. Indeed PalmSource is probably the most positive side of their business but their hardware side is picking up with the introduction of the Zire and Tungsten ranges.
I believe Palm deserve the ultimate respect for surviving in this crowded marketplace and I am sure they will struggle for a few years to come. Companies like Sony have enormous reserves of money and people available to them and so they should be producing a better product and it is a testemant to Palm that they are starting to fight back against Sony and even the Pocket PC range.
The irony of this market is that all too often some very good devices stop being produced with the Psion range being the most obvious example. Have a look at these emails which sum up people's feelings of the Psion range:-
"Hi Shaun, I'm sorry to say that I can't help Pete with his problem, but instead I wanted to thank you. I myself just replaced my t615c with a Psion Revo after reading your article The Perfect PDA. I found I didn't have enough money for the 5mx but I ordered the Revo and I must say I'm really happy with it. I prefer it's built in PIM apps to Palm's and I think that I'll die if I get another PDA and it doesn't have a nice, big, built in keyboard. My only problem is the lack of good games, but I figure if I have vexed and a few good level packs I'm set for life. Thanks again, Tim Reid"
"I am a Psion convert myself and I know the powers of the Psion Agenda. I exactly felt the same, and one of my first purchases was a new datebook program. I prefer Datebook5 from Pimlico on the NX70, which gives You all the features you know from the Psion Agenda and some more. Same is true for iambics Agendus, but I like Datebook better. Look at both, they are both extremly powerful. cheers Christian Armbruster"
"Dear Shaun, Happy Birthday, if it's not to late... Unfortunately I don't think this will solve Pete's problem because I have to confirm your point about the professional usability of Psion computers' built in PIM (as well as office) software. But reading your message in today's news ticker, I felt like I had to give you my feelings: Today there's nothing in the world to compete with even what a Psion Series 3c offered already back in the mid '90s. Full stopp. I happened to go through the whole range of Psion's organisers with Org.II, Series 3a, 3c, 5, Revo+, 5mx, 5mxpro (32mb RAM), and Series 7 and I loved all of them. But they are no more there, so to speak. We have to live with it :-( and look at the alternatives. At some point, I tried a HP Jornada 620LX. It stayed two weeks with me. Later, a fellow HP 720 made it a few month...and numerous crashes! Microsoft powered Handheld or Pocket devices definitely have nothing to beat the Psion but merchandising. That's where the Clié came in. The NX70V in my case. Palm OS is just as sleak as EPOC was in it's time, just as stable too. The presence of a keyboard made it more familiar to me in the first place. Syncronization is great compared to Psion's serial connections. Bundeled Documents To Go a marvel. Build quality, screen quality, battery qualities: everything just a few times better than Psion. Camera and sound possibilities are enjoyable extras. But unfortunately no built in or third party PIM application I came across (Agendus, DateBk5,..) equals EPOC 5 so far. But, looking at Sony's and Palm Softwares recent evolutions, one has to be confident. And if the time comes, I'm sure we will be the first to know through CliéPlanet! Great site! Thank you Shaun, and nice weekend. Marc Crochet"
"Dear Sir I have only recently started to look at the web support for my Clie NR70 - this is how I found Clieplanet. I was once an avid fan of Psion - I had the original 4MB 5 series, the Ericsson MC218 (aka 5MX) and the Diamond Mako (aka Revo). I still find the Revo easier to use when held in the hand and using my thumbs to enter text than the virtual keyboard on the Clie. I wish Sony would buy the design of the Psion 5 keyboard and allow for horizontal display - which is needed for web browsing (the traditional tablet form factor is not suitable). Looks like in design terms Psion was many years ahead but did not have the sales volumes to fund the technology development (colour Psion 5 with a CF Type II would have been a killer device). Regards B Shah"
I have no doubt that if Psion was a much bigger company they would still be producing their PDA range and I'm sure there are employees sat in Psion's headquarters in London wondering why they failed when the product was the best in the word.
It's because the market can't sustain the small guy! ...and that's a real shame.