11 Jun
2019
11 Jun
'19
4:10 a.m.
On Mon, 10 Jun 2019 at 22:57, Tomasz Rola via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
I share the sentiment and I guess I could give similar description
(yours was very interesting, BTW).
Thank you!
If I had a privilege to own
Psion. But, when I went on for shopping, Psion was already bowing out
of the PDA market. So I bought Compaq iPAQ 3630, installed Familiar
Linux on it and hoped there would be a future when PDAs can be
bought. Hoho, I was so wrong. But while researching, I could on one
ocassion tap a bit on this excellent Psion 5mx keyboard in a shop. I
think about this keyboard to this very day.
Nothing ever was better and fitted in your pocket. *Nothing*.
About displays: my ideal display was the one from iPAQ
(they were also
used in other handheld PDAs of the time). It was called transflective
LCD. They are easily recognized, because the light can be permamently
turned off. "Normal" LCD has a backlight, i.e. a layer of
leds/incandescents which shine through from the back of the display
towards the user. Transflectives have special reflective layer in the
back, and a diode on a side. The external light reflects and shines
back through the crystal layer. Sorry for laymanish description, but I
hope I have got it right.
Anyway, such display looked best in full sun. The one in 3630 could
display 4096 colors (with spectrum slightly bent towards pinky). Later
iPAQ models could do 65k colors (again slightly bent, but this time
much less visible). I used mine PDA as a proto ebook reader, lots of
html and pdb material read outdoors. The same kind of LCD was to be
found in many phones.
Fascinating. I did not know transreflective LCDs were in PDAs. I only
knew of them from the One Laptop Per Child project. There was an
attempt to "productize" them as Pixel Qi but it died:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi
For whatever reason, morons decided the shiny LCD
should be next best
thing. And transflective got lost. Just like this.
Nada. Appears like
the very meaning of "mobile" changed during last twenty years - first
it meant "outdoors" and now it means "from one couch to another,
indoors".
A tragic loss for all of us. Triple-layer transmissive LCDs are a
terrible bodge of a technology, and it is only because they are so bad
that things like OLED look like good alternatives.
But since it is all that anyone knows now, we think they are great.
Twenty years ago people using such tech were easily
falling into
"elite users" of some kind. Either because of earnings or because they
had nontrivial needs and were decided to satisfy them - and the
machines reflected this. Not so with todays users, and again, machines
reflect this.
Yes, true.
I am rather baffled whenever I read Psion had milion
users and yet
this was not enough for them. Plenty of people would consider
themselves lucky if their books, cars or games were bought by this
many. The attitude of Psion managers is totally disgusting for me,
unless I had not taken something into account.
Agreed.
This is something Planet Computers understands and I hope that it continues to.
Perhaps niche technical products should be sold by
those who
understand niche markets. I imagine that if I came to manager of niche
recording label and suggested he should get rid of musicians and start
recording some generic crap outsourced from other side of the world to
"reduce costs" I guess I would fly out the window with his boot in my
arse. In contrast, I imagine that coming with similar proposition to
manager of huge (so called) tech firm I would get a bl**job and some
of his shares. But maybe I am romantic.
:-D Excellent comparison!
--
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