Psion may be dead, but they will live on in our hearts forever

 

I used a Revo through out most of my high school career. It was my third arm and I don’t think I could have managed my life without it. When I got a new laptop I sold my only British import and life has just been weird ever since. Andrew Orlowski published a massive 10 page tear jerker of an article outlining where Psion started, what their golden age was like and why they failed. Psion may not be known here in the states very well, Palm was always the leader, but Palm devices didn’t have a keyboard until the Treo. It so happened that by chance, due in part to the internet, I learned about Psion.

Highly recommended read. Favorite part:

And being the only senior software design person was an especially unjoyful experience. On one of the four platforms, we had to combine the spec of our previous Psion applications and user interface, with the specification of a new device Nokia had been developing. So there’s me locked in a room with about 15 Nokia designers, who, it slowly transpires, view Symbian as a software house they have just bought in order to deliver their product.

I explain to them the thinking behind the various things in the Psion UI – why it just saves changes automatically, why a second tap means “open”, why it has infoprints [informational messages] in the corner, why ToDos appear on the main Diary screen, all that kind of stuff that we’d worked out over the years, and they listen and then they say “yes, but we want you to do this”. So we didn’t exactly get on well in those meetings.

If you’re a long time reader of mine you definitley know how much I loathe the S60 PIM.

[Via: All About Symbian]