On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 5:55 PM, Jason T <silent700 at gmail.com> wrote: Damned if I know. The development speed of Android is really showing up some phone manufacturers - I heard it recently referred to in an article as "the frenetic non-stop pace of Android development". Yeah, because under half a dozen releases in a couple of years is just insane, nobody could keep up with that. (!) ;?) The device I am most interested in at the moment (that I actually can *get* in the UK) is the Dell Streak, formerly the Dell Mini 5. It too only runs 1.6 and it's a PITA. I am very interested but not until the company gets its collective finger out and ships an update to a relatively current version of Android. Preferably, 2.2 or newer. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

On 16 July 2010 18:51, Philip Belben <philip at axeside.co.uk> wrote: Well, true - but there is nothing quite like the Series 3 any more and I don't think there ever will be again. Frankly, although there were things I really missed about my various S3s, the S5s were better in so many important or significant ways that I never considered moving back. I preferred the S3 interface, the keyboard shortcuts, the file/program manager and much more, but the S5 was so much more capable, I never regretted moving. I'd give a lot for a modern S5 type device, but I would never go back to an S3 today, I'm afraid... -- Liam Proven ? Profile & links: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

On 17 July 2010 10:21, Philip Belben <philip at axeside.co.uk> wrote: Me either. Sorry... :?) That's true and a good point. I have disposed of all my S5s while they were still working and worth half-decent money, something I now vaguely regret. Instead, I had a netBook - well, a 7Book - that I still used regularly up until 2008. Very rarely do now, though - my Nokia Communicator E90 has pretty much replaced it. Glad you saved the 3s but it's terribly sad to hear about the 5s. Oddly, actually, I had more problems with my various 3s. The touchpad icons used to regularly fail, or the hinge would break. I did have S5 breakages but more rarely. Hmm. Tricky, in a way. The 3s were a programmable PDA, a closed architecture which wasn't very extensible. Great at what they did, the best I ever had, saw, tried or even read about, but limited. The 5s were miniature computers. They could, at a push, do the Web and email; they used CF cards, for cheap big storage; they had a proper keyboard I could type at speed on, and a wordprocessor with a wordcount function, something *absolutely* essential in a text editor for me. I can live without almost anything else so long as I have a usable full-screen editor and a wordcount. Guess what my 3 and 3a's wordprocessor didn't have. I read books on my 5s, as PDFs. I ran Sinclair Spectrum apps in emulators and Infocom games under a Z interpreter. I backed up, synched, sorted and managed my mobile phone's 2 address books and the SMS message store - I also routinely texted from the S5 with its excellent keyboard. Just the thing if you needed to send a text to multiple people, or cut'n'paste. I had it set up to automatically back itself up to my laptop over infrared, just when it was nearby and in line-of-sight. That's aside from a whole host of 3rd party software which I could just download and send over. I wrote many thousands of words on my 5s and 5MXs; in terms of articles I sold, it paid for itself inside 6 months. Probably less - I seem to recall that within a month or so of getting my 5, I wrote a magazine feature on it during a long coach trip that meant that the little machine had recouped its ?300-?400 price with the first 5,000 words or so I wrote on it. (I did also write a short book on the 3A once. It crashed and lost the lot. A very, very rare occurrence, but as always, at the worst possible time; I'd been away travelling for a month and had no way to back it up.) OK, so, the 5's file manager was a smidge more awkward, and because everything was optimised for the touchscreen, the apps weren't so easily keyboard-controlled. Fewer hotkeys, which were inconsistent with the previous machine and with each other in places. The stylus latch tended to stick, too. But overall, it was a brilliant bit of kit, a lot more versatile than my much-loved 3 and 3A. I never got as far as a 3C or 3MX, sadly. The Series 5 had the single best form factor of any pocket computer or PDA of any kind ever, and by a country mile the best keyboard of any pocket-sized device of any kind, ever; so good it makes things like the Blackberry or any QWERTY phone look like a sad, sick joke. And furthermore, I would assert and defend the position that those are absolute, objective judgements, not my personal subjective preferences. The software stack was stunning and is still impressive today. It's not just me, either: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/26/psion_special/print.html The Psion 3 was brilliant. For me it was a life-transforming device, vastly more useful than my Psion Organizer II LZ64 ever had been. It was the ultimate pocket organizer, calendar, address book, diary, alarm clock, etc. It was a masterpiece of industrial design and software efficiency. The Psion 5, though, was all this as well plus a whole lot more; a connected communication tool which could interchange files and media with desktop PCs, sync with PC desktop PIM tools and more besides. It was effortlessly better for me than anything Palm ever produced (and yes, I owned several), less clever but far more practical than the Apple Newton (and yes, I owned several), and made the PC-compatible pocket computers (Atari Portfolio, HP LX and Omnigo, Poqet etc.) look like pathetic also-rans. Psion were right in the long term: eventually, phones would kill off their niche. However even today no phone has ever been produced that can equal the overall usefulness of the Psion 5. To be a phone something has to be relatively small and able to slip into a trouser pocket. This means it needs to be tiny, with tiny buttons and a tiny screen, and for me, as a PDA, that means phones are too limited and too constrained to really excel. I have about the biggest modern 3G phone it's possible to get, a 5-inch-long Nokia E90, and it's *too damned small*. Although it has vastly more functions than my Series 5s did, the things it shares with the S5, in /every single one/ the S5 did it better, more powerfully, more flexibly, and usually quicker. And it's based on the same OS! Frankly, I'd happily swap my E90 for a modern Series 5 and a modern Nokia 6310i. The phone should be the identical form factor, but updated to a quad-band LTE modem with basic smartphone functions, and it would link with a modern Psion equivalent with a gigahertz-class CPU, a transreflective colour screen, a few gig of storage, USB instead of serial, Wifi and Bluetooth as well as infrared and a couple of SD slots in place of the CF slot. But I don't think such devices will ever come round again, sadly. I'll probably get a Dell Streak and curse at it. -- Liam Proven ? Profile & links: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

Hi, On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 08:25:23PM +0100, Tony Duell wrote: Speaking from personal experience, the HP200LX makes for a great mobile serial terminal. I've used it with various machines, sitting behind the rack (warmed by the machine exhaust fans *g*). I started writing my diploma thesis on the HP200LX with LaTeX, but later moved to my Linux workstation as I started to include graphics. There seems to be a dominating mindset that sees mobile devices (like palmtops) just as extensions of ones desktop. To someone like me, who uses them as mostly standalone devices, with occasionally copying data from/to them, that is rather silly. Well, you can get various programming languages for DOS, among others, the Borland compilers come to mind (and Turbo C++ works quite well on my HP200LX). Kind regards, Alex. -- "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison

On 18 July 2010 20:25, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: I'm sure you're right, but in all my years on the Psion 5/5mx, I never ever used a terminal emulator, as far as I can recall. The series 3 had one in ROM, but the ROM was in the serial interface. Plug in the RS232 cable, suddenly, a VT100/200 app became available. :?) There were various downloadable ones for the S5 and 5mx, but I never bothered. No need, for me. Primarily, the machines were a pocket database/diary, secondly a writing tool, thirdly mobile phone backup & SMS messagebase management, and peripheral to these, a calculator and occasional web browser. I tried out the email but never actually used it apart from the occasional emergency. I never did get to grips with RPN. I did play with the terminal app on a review model of HP Omnigo 700, the weird hybrid one with a mobile phone. This was the ancestor of what became the Communicator, and even in the early days of the mid-1990s, its potential was apparent. I never owned one or used one, though - way too expensive to buy or use, and if I had the money, still way too bulky. -- Liam Proven ? Profile & links: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

On 19 July 2010 21:37, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: I am very happy to say that I have not used a serial port for anything in a good 2-3y now, and not for anything more than a very occasional sync of my Psion 7book (and one old PC - Freecycled away a couple of years ago - with a serial mouse) since the turn of the century. There were only a small number of times in the late 1990s. I really hate RS232. It is the most troublesome interface of any kind on any computer I've ever used. I celebrate its disappearance with joy and I hope never to have to use such a port again. All the crap with baud rates, stop bits, parity bits, flow control and all that hateful 1960s-ish nonsense is just a fading memory now and I hope I never have to refresh it. Apple did serial ports right on the Mac. You plugged things in, they worked, thankyou and goodnight. But try interfacing non-Apple kit to Macs, or to anything else, and the horror-story of RS232 dropped you into the nightmare of RS423 and so on. I shudder to recall. I really like USB. For storage, I preferred Firewire, but that's going away now, sadly. But USB works, is wonderfully versatile, fairly idiot-proof and does everything I want or need: keyboard, mice, scanners, printers, storage, modems and networking once in a blue moon... It's terrific. Not an issue. I kept all the software on my S5 and 7book on a CompactFlash card, so it was non-volatile and survived power loss, flat batteries etc. /De gustibus non est disputandam./ However, I would point out that, quite aside from my personal life, in my career as a field engineer and general IT bod, my Psions were great helps to me. They held my appointment books, my client contact details, and numerous databases of reference info, from RSR232 (F/X: *spit*) pinouts and PC I/O port and IRQ assignments, standard definitions, command references and all sorts. That, surely, would be of use to you? I very rarely use a calculator at all any more - usually just for totting up bills and things. I am perfectly happy with conventional arithmetic, never find it a limitation or hazard, and generally dislike having to adapt my habits to the patterns of logic of machines. The purpose of computers is as an aid to my mind; they, I feel, should come to me, not me to them. Thus I never learned, nor even tried to, any assembly language or machine code; I bought faster computers and continued to use BASIC. I dislike C, Perl and so on. I seldom used to use hex, preferring decimal and binary. There is of course an art to finding the right balance, but I tend to favour ease over efficiency, simplicity over complexity and so on. -- Liam Proven ? Profile & links: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

Hi, On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 5:44 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: Just checked my 5mx, it is under Extras / Comms. It can do vt-100 as well as TTY. -- Regards, Torfinn Ingolfsen