On 28/09/05, Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote:
My Kyocera 7135 has all the features you listed,
Never heard of it.
[Googles]
No it bloody well doesn't.
The Psion 5/5mx & Ericsson MC218 weren't phones, they were PDAs. The
best PDA made so far.
Your phone doesn't have a keyboard at all; it has a key*pad*. The
Psion has a three-quarter size full-travel QWERTY keyboard upon which
it's possible to touchtype.
Your phone has a stamp-sized screen, albeit in colour. But who /needs/
colour? The Psion has a 640x240, half-VGA mono LCD. Kinda green by
today's standards but excellent for 1998.
40h use? I flat-out don't believe you. That's /use/ - not standby
time, which is many *months*. We're talking 2 *days* of *continuous*
operation.
A proper, smooth, very fast, well-integrated multitasking OS with
basic memory protection.
Accepts up to a gig of storage on CF.
Doesn't sync well to a PC, but you never needed to. The Psion /was/
your PIM. You could both file-transfer and simply cut&paste between
Psion and Windows. Multitasked with all PC apps and OSs, and Mac and
Linux too.
They were wonderful little machines. Never really took off in the US,
like so much non-US tech. But then, I wondered around Colorado with my
Newton 2100 in '99 or so and all the Murricans were amazed by my cool
foreign toy. :?(
I miss my Psion. I've moved to a Nokia 7710 smartphone - 640x350
colour touchscreen, same processor but 10x faster, 10x as much
storage, and same OS but in a newer version (v7 instead of v5),
Bluetooth instead of IRDA, MMC instead of CF, stereo sound, plays MP3
& MP4, FM radio...
It's vastly slower, crashes regularly, I can't run my old apps 'cos
the newer OS uses Unicode, the screen is cramped because of hyuuuge
fonts and widgets, made garish by ugle themes (I hate display themes
in software) and i want my sodding keyboard back. I have a Bluetooth
one but it's not the same.
Technology sometimes moves backwards. Yes, the Nokia is a phone,
camera & music player too, but it's a vastly inferior, slower, less
stable, more feature-poor PDA.
I'd give good money like a shot for a modern Psion. Same size, make
the CF slot CF2, add in SDIO/MMC & Bluetooth and a headphone socket.
Link via USB instead of RS232. Like the Nokia, 10x the RAM, 10x the
speed - tho' 40x the speed is now doable. I don't even really need a
colour screen - I'd rather have good battery life.
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