Today we have an interview with Jon Read, a man you have probably not heard of. But, for those of you who used to own a Psion PDA he is likely to be responsible for having taken a lot of your time a few years ago- he certainly did for me. It turns out that he has done a lot since that time, but none of it matters to me as much as his crowning acheivement- he made Jumpy!!! Read on to find out what he really did and what makes the man tick-

1/ How did you get involved in programming games for Psion and was it a worthwhile venture for you?

I had always been interested in programming ever since I got a Commodore 64 as a kid.  My first Psion was an Organizer II CM, which is where I first started developing in OPL (Organizer Programming Language), and managed to implement some fairly basic things that I was overly impressed with at the time.  I eventually upgraded the CM to an LZ (Four lines of text! 64 whole kilobytes of RAM!), paid for by working weekends in Woolworth’s coffee bar.

From there, I remember the product brochure for the Series 3 dropping through my door, and my jaw hit the floor as soon as I read it.  It was a dream machine!  4.7MHz CPU, 240×80 LCD bitmapped display, multitasking!  I had to have one – but no way I could afford it. After much pleading and negotiation, I extracted a promise from my wonderfully generous father that I could have one for Christmas/Birthday.  I was still at school at the time.

So, with Series 3 in hand, my OPL programming really took off.  After learning the ins and outs of the system, Jumpy! was born in early 1992. I remember spending many hours working on the optimization alone – finding exactly which combination of operations and resources could be used together to extract maximum speed from the machine.  I may be wrong, but I’m not sure than anyone else ever got a full-screen scrolling game working as fast on the Psion handhelds – that’s not a great claim to fame, but I have precious few so I’m running with it

I released Jumpy! as shareware, and got letters (and even hand-drawn pictures, all of which I still have) from all over the world from people who were playing and enjoying the game.  I think that’s what pleased me most; at this time I was earning practically nothing from it.  I went to university, and had begun to drift away from Psion development, until one day I received a letter from Psion.  They had found Jumpy! on FIDOnet (remember, this was well before the Internet was available to most people outside of universities and large institutions) and wanted to release it on a Games Pack, if I would agree to that.  Would I?  Hell yes!

So, Games Pack I was launched with Jumpy! on the front of the box.  I wasn’t paid a fortune – £0.40 per copy sold – but as anyone who has struggled financially as a student will know, the money was incredibly welcome.  Incidentally, if anyone has a boxed copy of the Jumpy! games pack, please consider selling it to me – I don’t have one, and never have had.

Fast forward to 1993, and the launch of the 3a.  Again, no way I could afford one, even with royalties drifting in from sales of Jumpy!, so colour me excited when I get a call from Psion asking me to write another game for a forthcoming “Games Pack 3a”.  Yes, they would supply a Series 3a for me to work on. Fantastic!

Six months or so later, I sent Psion the final code for PopOut (a breakout clone).  This didn’t make quite the same splash as Jumpy! did, but did OK and received some very good reviews.

After university, I was offered a temporary job at Psion Software.  I worked there for 3 months and was exposed to what was to become the operating system for the Series 5.  Then it was back to university to start a PhD, part-way through which the Series 5 was launched.  I loved that handheld – even more so as Psion loaned me one to encourage me to write some more games for it.  I still have that loan unit, I’m guessing they don’t want it back any more…

In any case, it worked – I ported Jumpy! to the Series 5 and updated it to Jumpy! Plus, adding more features and more levels.  I also back-ported the Plus version to the 3a (and Siena), releasing it as shareware.

That didn’t signal the end of my involvement with Psion though. Again, another phone call out of the blue, telling me about a new product they were working on and how they’d like to get one of my games included in its ROM by default.  The game they were interested in was a version of the classic SameGame (I had released a version for the Series 3/3a/5 and Siena), which ended up being renamed “Cascade”, shipped on the lovely Psion Revo, and probably caused quite a few wasted hours for many people

Unfortunately there were no more Psion handhelds.  Psion Software became Symbian, Psion themselves drifted into relative obscurity, I got a job, and that was the end of my game development.

I do still maintain epoc zone, and my personal Psion pages still exist here.

2/ Have you programmed other titles for different platforms and would you consider doing so again for the latest smartphones?

I haven’t written games for any other platforms, but have worked in the mobile phone arena since around 1999 as an embedded software engineer. More recently I’ve been developing apps for the iPhone and worked with some pretty major manufacturers on operating system features for new Android handsets. Nothing much in a personal capacity, but that is due to change shortly as I leave full-time employment and go freelance.

So to answer the other part of your question, games on the iPhone/iPad or Android?  It’s definitely a distinct possibility.

3/ What phone do you use now and why?

I have an iPhone 3G.  Not a 3Gs, not a 4.  I may upgrade… but it’s not a priority for me at the moment.  In the day job I get to play with phones that haven’t even hit the rumour sites yet, so I don’t really feel the need to own the latest & greatest myself.

I tried using Symbian phones, but could never really feel for them the same way I did my Psion handhelds (and to a lesser extent, the iPhone).  My next phone may even be an Android device, though I’m really not a Java fan.

4/ Do you believe that the Psion range of PDAs were ahead of their time?

Absolutely.  What else was there?  There were a few Windows CE devices, and perhaps the DIP Pocket PC/Atari Portfolio, but in comparison they were slow, clunky and lacking in features.

Psion’s real masterstroke was in allowing the handhelds to be programmed, not only via a PC, but on the device itself.  This led to a massive amount of available software, much like the iPhone today, albeit without a central app store.  All of my games were written on the palmtop, not on a desktop PC.

5/ What game do you wish you had created?

Hmm, that’s a difficult one.  I actually wrote but never finished quite a few other games, including one RPG, some puzzle games, and card games.  I really wish I’d managed to get those out, especially the RPG, as nothing like it was ever seen on Psion palmtops. Unfortunately, as is often the case, life intervened and I never managed to devote the required time to polishing them off.

To be honest, I’m not a massive games player myself.  Of other people’s games, I think the ones I was most impressed with were De3ender and Stigma from Psion’s “Games Arcade” pack.

6/ How does it make you feel to know that many of us played your games for hours on end and still think of them fondly to this day?

To be honest, it doesn’t seem particularly real to me.  It was a long time ago, and I’ve *never* actually seen anyone playing a single one of my games. Having said that, I am proud of it in my own small way, and as I said I’ve kept all the letters I received.  By todays standards, these games are pretty poor, but I suppose we shouldn’t be judging them in comparison to apps on the colour-screened 1GHz+ handheld devices available now.

So yes… a little proud, definitely pleased, but it’s hardly the first thing I bring up in conversation when I first meet someone

The Psion 3a was launched in 1993, 17 years ago, which seems like more than a few lifetimes in the mobile industry. In an industry where two years always brings change that would have been inconceivable 24 months earlier, the Psion 3a defies everything we think about the mobile industry and presents an experience that does not seem possible. It is surely impossible that a 17 year old PDA can be useful in 2010. Looking at the specifications you would believe that it the case-

7.68Mhz processor, 480 x 160 pixel monochrome LCD, 19,200 bit/s RS-232 connectivity. Expansion via solid state disks; flash which need to be formatted to reclaim space and RAM which require a battery to hold the data.

It sounds pathetic doesn’t it, but those specs highlight everything that was great about the Psion PDA setup. The minimal processor and mono screen helped to produce a battery life measured in weeks, not hours. Two AA batteries would last over a month for typical users and it does put the rechargeable batteries we use today in context. Of course the batteries of today have to cope with the technology of today so it is not a good comparison, but what would you choose? Thirty days of use on replaceable batteries or one day on rechargeables?

I bought a Psion 3a last week specifically for this review for the huge amount of £5 + postage and using one again has not only brought back some memories, but some surprises as well. It says as much about what is wrong with smartphones today as it shows off the great strides that have been made in the past seventeen years. It is far from small by today’s standards, but it does have an aesthetic quality that verges on beautiful. That may sound over the top, and it is, but the way in which it opens with the super clever icon panel pivoting out from nowhere still enchants me today. The 2D icons above the rounded keys, none of which quite match each other, exemplify the 1990’s from a gadget point of view more than anything else in the mobile world.

The keyboard is big and is actually too big to thumb type comfortably, but the space between the keys makes typing far easier than it should. Of course Psion nailed the mobile keyboard with the 5 series that followed, but this one is capable of allowing comfortable periods of data entry. The monochrome screen is perfectly viewable in all conditions, except the dark due to no backlight until the 3c, and has a good resolution which makes word processing and spreadsheet management a breeze.

In terms of pre-loaded software, the 3a had a lot included; Data (contacts), Word, Agenda, Time, Calc and Sheet offered everything that was needed in 1993 to replace the dreadful Filofax. When you consider the thousands of applications that became available the Psion 3a was the very first PDA to offer a flexible mobile experience that was suitable for the organised and the tinkerers. The Apple Newton MessagePad 100 was released in the same year, but from a personal point of view it offers a backwards scenario to what we see today. At the time Apple offered a clunky solution that was not suitable for the masses and Psion nailed it first time. Today the reverse is true; Apple has nailed the mass mobile market.

Every part of the OS on the Psion is consistently implemented and the Agenda has, to the day, never been beaten. It offers a split screen day view, week view, year view, To-do list, Anniversaries and a list view. The wide screen form factor helps, but it looks so natural and is perfect for those who like a calendar to be visually organised. The contacts app offers everything you need to keep a huge database of contacts handy and you can even dial numbers audibly by clicking one simple key combination.

Word includes word counts, pagination, outlines, style galleries and all sorts of other features that were not standard at the time. The Sheet application contains a huge number of features that can be used to create quite complex files which are almost as featured as can be created on a smartphone today. Even the calculator comes with powerful functions such as logs, radians and trig. Throw in OPL which allows you to create apps directly on the Psion and you start to see how powerful this PDA was at the time.

If only it was super quick and never crashed. Oh yes, it is super quick and never crashes. The fact is that the Psion 3a was remarkable at the time and in many ways is still remarkable today. I am not saying for one moment that it competes with smartphones of today, but that it not to say that it could not be used as an organisational tool and one which will do almost everything you need. With the addition of some powerful apps it could be used for serious activities too; I remember the official Money application which was way ahead of anything I had used elsewhere and even TomTom started out by producing mapping solutions for the Psion range. There were some excellent games released as well of which HomeRun and Jumpy are still firm favourites of mine.

I admit that sentimentality plays a big part in this review. I admit to once spending over £100 on a 1MB Psion flash expansion card. I admit to owning as many Psion accessories as I could lay my hands on and I admit to being completely besotted with the device at the time. The real surprise is that seventeen years later, it is still a joy to use and is an object that holds its own in a world of super stylish smartphones that have ten times the power my first PC had, and a thousand times the power this little (big) Psion has.

The Psion 3a had a big impact on me at the time, so much so that I started my first website dedicated to Psions (see here) and it will always have a special place in my heart. Seventeen years later I spend hours each day writing about smartphones for PDA-247 and freelance projects, and it is all because of this PDA which was further ahead of its time than any mobile device has been since.

Look out for my retro review of the iPhone 3GS in 2027, which would also have cost me £5 from eBay.

I will try to write a retro review once a week and will be looking at influential PDAs, mobile phones and smartphones from times gone by that helped to shape what we use today.

vboelema came up with the following ‘rant’ concerning the success of the iPad compared to a device which was released many, many years ago. Despite the fact that some of us are seen as banging on about Psion too much, I have to agree. The form factor is nearly perfect, the keyboard is the best available and the battery life is astonishing- a Psion 7 like device would do BIG business.

The LapDock has got to be a joke huh?  I certainly hope so, and even if it isn’t, it still made me laugh!

The Psion netbook with some small updates (make that big considering the years of neglect it has suffered) could a lot of new business. People have changed their mind about small, instant on, practical and 24/7 Internet.  I am absolutely loving my Asus 9″ screen netbook, but it would be even better with instant on.  BUT today I hooked it up to a printer to scan and print a few things,it is practically married to my USB modem (if only I could just stick the SIM card straight into the damn thing!) I hooked it up my external HD drive where I store all my music, films and things I don’t need “on the go” and I hooked up my external disk drive to burn a cd for someone.  Yet what I lug around has been severely cut back, and I have stopped using my E71 to go online (I’m sure if I had an iPhone or such like it would be a different story!)  Some of us don’t demand that much, but we need to be able to use the thing in everyday life.  Something like the Psion netbook could bridge the gap between consumer iPad appeal, and wanting versatility.

Rant finished.

The Psixpda is now available to buy on eBay for £499. It is a curious device which some like and others think is overpriced, but in my mind it certainly has a place and might do quite well.

Designed to be both powerful and stylish. It offers essential PC-ing where portability and availability is required.

Psi)(pda’s high performance is incredible in relation to its size. Give this UMPC a once-over and you will fall in love with your PDA all over again. This sleek and luxurious design is infused with a touch of class that lives only in the imagination.

It has a natural and inspiring form factor and feel, where class is combined with power and flexibility.

Psi)(pda is built to the highest specification and is one of the world’s smallest and lightest Pocket PC‘s available.

SlashGear has also produced a video demo of the device. I quite like the hardware, but the software experience doesn’t quite inspire.

You can expect to pay upwards of £400 for the latest and greatest smartphones, and they are arguably well worth the money when you consider the amount of use they get through. However, if you are on a lower budget or simply don’t wish to spend this amount of money there are many excellent smartphone options now available to keep you organised every day. Let’s take a look at some of the best mobile devices available for under £250-

BlackBerry Curve 8520 (£188.60)

I have used all of the available BlackBerry phones and the 8520 is the fastest by far. It has the (currently) unique optical trackpad which is a joy to use and which of course does away with the trackballs that have a tendency to get stuck. A good keyboard, bright screen in all conditions and a pleasing design make this a huge bargain for anyone who needs a reliable and quick smartphone that is more practical than most.

Data Input:  QWERTY hardware keyboard
3G: No
Wi-Fi: Yes
GPS: No
Battery: 9/10
Value: 9/10

HP Data Messenger (£205.85)

The Data Messenger is packed with specifications and was well priced at launch, but the recent reductions make it one of the best value Windows Mobile phones on the market. Nothing is missing and only the rather bulky design and slightly quirky keyboard detract from what is otherwise an excellent choice for the mobile user who needs to accomplish lots on the go. Definitely a workhorse for the masses.

Data Input: QWERTY hardware keyboard
3G: Yes
Wi-Fi: Yes
GPS: Yes
Battery: 7/10
Overall: 8/10

Also consider the HP Voice Messenger for £159.85

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (£247.25)

The Nokia 5800 has sold by the lorry load since launch and packs a lot into a small space. At launch the 5th Edition software was not quite as smooth as we would have liked, but recent updates have raised it to a level where you can work and play in equal measure. Voice quality is excellent and the inclusion of a 3.2MP camera adds to an impressively build phone that will last you for at least a couple of years.

Data Input: Touchscreen
3G: Yes
Wi-Fi: Yes
GPS: Yes
Battery: 8/10
Overall: 8/10

Acer beTouch E100 (£241.50)

The beTouch E100 is a large screened Windows Mobile 6.5 device which pack copious amounts of memory alongside GPS, HSPA, a 3.2” screen all in a 12mm body. Only Wi-Fi is missing from an otherwise complete feature set which together makes for one of the more stylish and practical Windows Mobile smartphones.
Data Input: Touchscreen
3G: Yes
Wi-Fi: No
GPS: Yes
Battery: 7/10
Overall: 7/10

Psion Revo Plus (£143.75)

OK, bear with me here. This is not exactly a smartphone, but I could write for hours about the greatness of Psion PDAs and couldn’t resist including a Psion Revo. Clove sells remanufactured units with a 6 month warranty and also includes the software and docking cradle. Some would say that they are not practical in 2009, but if having the best mobile calendar ever, one of the best keyboards and a battery life that lasts for days and days and days is not practical, I don’t know what is. Still brilliant!

Data Input: QWERTY hardware keyboard / Stylus
3G: No
Wi-Fi: No
GPS: No
Battery: 10/10
Overall: 8/10

Dr David Potter retired yesterday and stood down from his role at Psion Teklogic. In my opinion, he was the man who really started the PDA industry and without him the industry would look very different today. PDA-247 would certainly never have existed and I suspect that is true for many other sites as well.

As AAS points out, he started Psion with £70,000 of his own money in 1980 and the company eventually produced PDAs which many people still use every day. AAS also points to a lengthy article at The Register which details the history of Psion in every detail. Finally, Steve Litchfield wrote a definitive history of Psion over at 3-Lib which tells you everything else you need to know.

Thanks for everything David!

My recent criticism of the iPhone calendar caused some discussion on 247 and now Brad has come up with an interesting commentary on the matter. It shows that one feature really can make or break a device.

It’s been a LONG time for me in visiting your (very different now) site! About a year. That’s when I bought a new Win Vista laptop and discovered that my Clie could not sync with it. I then turned to the iPod Touch. Love many of its features. Absolutely HATE many of its “features.” It is such a prime time OS wannabee!

I 100% share your blog about the iPhone OS Calendar. AND your feelings of changing platforms. As a matter of fact, I came to your site to see if you still covered Windows Mobile to get a list of PDA’s that still might be manufactured that used that OS. I am so fed up with Apple.

I own Pocket Informant. Yeah, it’s the best PIM for iPhone OS out there, but DateBk it is not! Is it just me, or did Palm apps come out of the gate with more maturity than what we are seeing on the iPhone OS? This whole limitation of Apple to the Calendar API is just stupid! Well, Apple stupidity is a whole different blog in and of itself (iTunes Windows bugs that they don’t care to fix, their stupid new ratings and impositions on developers, the length of time it takes for revisions to get approved, etc.).

With PI to sync with Outlook, we have to sync with Google Cal, then (using an add-in) sync Outlook with Google Cal. Then if we wanted alarms, set them in Outlook, then sync with iTunes! How’s that for a several-step process in which some of your appointments can get screwed up? It happened to me. More than once. So I no longer use PI and am back to using the plain-vanilla iPhone Cal. Yuck. But at least I only have to do one sync with that and not have to worry about double-booking or missing appointments again because something got messed up!

When PI gets the Outlook sync feature, then I’ll try it again. But I sure miss the features of DateBk. Like someone mentioned, PI doesn’t have a full year view. PI doesn’t have a lot of things that DateBk had, even in its early versions. It’s pretty, but pretty doesn’t give me efficiency.

Calendaring is only one of the weaknesses of iPhone that has me looking at iPaq’s for the first time in my 11-year-old-PDA life. With a Palm OS PDA, all we did was press that sync button once, and Docs2Go, app installation, appointments, email, doc readers, scriptures, PDA readers–everything synced at once. With iPhone OS, you have separate syncs with every app that requires one! A pain! What’s worse, I am now finding out that if your WiFi network goes down (my router died), I cannot sync those apps at all. What a stink!

So yeah, I’m looking at leaving iPhone OS. I’ll miss having this nice, slim, and light little Touch in my pocket. But there are just some things that I just can’t stand anymore!

Brad

Clove recently set up a new blog to discuss smartphone and mobile industry happenings and one of the posts detailed the smartphones each of the team use. Colin’s section caught my eye for obvious reasons-

“Colin – A Psion user!  Yes, say no more he does still use one, and what’s more it looks brand new. There is nothing he doesn’t know about Psions and you want catch him using anything else for his diary and contact database.  He does have a very basic Nokia too.  Although he knows all about Windows and Symbian etc, we will not see him using one any time soon.”

I envy Colin because I have wasted so much money on smartphones and PDAs over the years doing needless upgrades which were no better than the previous devices, and here he is quite happy with probably the best handheld platform ever produced. Clove are probably happy about my upgrades as well because most have been bought from them! I am convinced that it still competes in many areas today and asked Colin to answer some questions about his Psion usage-

1/ Colin. Obvious question first- why are you still using a Psion? What is it that makes you stick with one even though newer smartphones have more advanced features?

Seasoned Psion users tend to consider the basic organiser programs more flexible and user friendly especially the data and agenda applications and these two represent my main use of my machine.Windows mobile devices are certainly more technically advanced but I do not need to carry PC applications on my handheld , nor do I need Web access on the move for example.

2/ Which Psion do you use, and how many have you owned in the past?

I use a Psion 5MX , but have previously used Psion series 3,3c,3mx and the original series 5.

3/ Do you connect it to a desktop computer and how do you keep your data backed up?

I back up to a PC, but I did learn the hard way like lots of other PDA users when I lost my data having dropped my device and dislodging the batteries.

4/ How far back does your personal data go on your current Psion?

I first began using a Psion when I started working at Clove Technology in 1992 and so my data is fairly historical!

5/ Do you ever see yourself upgrading to a newer smartphone?

It seems inevitable that I will upgrade if for no other reasons that my device will eventually fail or Psiwin will not be compatible with Windows Vista for example.

My thanks go to Colin for answering the questions and to Clove for providing many years of first class service to me as a customer, even back to when I was buying Psion stuff from them. Clove is also responsible for almost all of the review devices supplied to 247 and is always around when help is needed.

engadget mobile has posted a picture of what is described as the Sony Ericsson Xperia X2. It is far from guaranteed to be genuine, but the screen looks bigger, it appears to tilt more and is it just me or is that a Psion 5MX style keyboard? If it turns out to be true, it is about time someone recreated the best mobile keyboard ever.

“A tipster tells us that the device you’re looking at here is Sony Ericsson’s codename “Vulcan” — better known as the X2 — which would presumably replace the X1 at some point in the next few days, weeks, months, or years. Though the picture’s small, you can clearly make out the X Panel button in the lower left of the phone’s front and a Windows key in the upper left of the keyboard, which adds a dose of credibility — the company has, after all, put quite a bit of time and effort into pimping its panel interface SDK, and right now, the X1 is the only device that supports it.”

Style in the standard mobile phone industry means everything. If a phone is ugly, it will not sell and that is a fact that has only been disproven a couple of times. The T-Mobile G1 is pretty ugly, but it is selling well and some would argue that the Sony Ericsson K800i was a ugly beast, but it still sold in huge numbers.

The smartphone market was different a couple of years ago and style was not high on the agenda of any manufacturer. As smartphones became more commonplace so did the need to smarten them up a bit and we now see very few smartphones which have no significant input from design teams. From the Xperia X1 to the Curve 8900, style is becoming more and more important as time passes and so here is my top 5 ugly and beautiful phones-

The ugly crowd-

1/ i-mate Ultimate 8502

2/ i-mate Ultimate 8150

3/ iCEPhone

4/ HTC Touch Cruise

5/ Nokia E90

The beautiful set-

1/ BlackBerry Curve 8900

2/ Nokia E71

3/ Toshiba TG01

4/ Xperia X1

5/ Psion Revo Plus

Somehow I suspect a few of you will disagree with the above lists…

Back in 1997 I could add a new calendar entry and include a sketch, memo, contact or an icon within it in one or two clicks. I could add the same information to sketches, contacts and around it went through all of the PIM applications on the Psion PDAs. It worked perfectly and offered a glimpse into the future of mobile application integration which could surely only improve over time. It did not…

Sony tried a similar method of integration in the Clie TH55, but the result was not as fluid as the Psion experience. It was still a useful and enjoyable to use addition to the standard PDA PIM feature set, but was sadly the last stand for Sony in the PDA market and we never saw the idea develop further.

In the twelve years that have passed since the introduction of this concept by Psion, none of the other platforms have attempted to bring a standard of rich integration which would seem to be a logical progression to help PDA users manage their data in an organised and efficient way. It does seem, however, that Palm is about to bring the idea back from the dead in webOS and the demo videos shown to date suggest a level of integration that goes some way to bringing the major applications together. We are still not going to witness anything close to the original Psion offering, but maybe that will happen in time.

Last week I talked about mobile calendars and how Psion and Palm managed to come up with solutions that gave users almost everything they needed in a mobile application, and because of this we have not seen great strides in this area since. Manufacturers vary the look of their standard calendars, but the core functionality is 90% identical to the originals which came to market over ten years ago.

I am convinced that there is much more potential available in making mobile applications work with each other and being able to move data between these applications. It is not just a fancy way to do the same thing; it is a mechanism that allows the individual to bring their data to a central place. Good organisation can be turned bad very easily by having data scattered around in different applications which do not talk to each other, and a PDA is the best organisation tool we have at the moment. It is with us all of the time, it can be updated and synchronised whenever you like, but we still spread data around a variety of applications. Let’s hope the likes of Apple and Microsoft look at what Palm is doing and jump on the bandwagon.

Organisation has been a prime requirement of everyone who walks the earth for as long as we have ‘walked the earth’ and the holy grail of organisation emerged in 1921 called the Filofax. The name was derived from an earlier moniker, file of facts, and was similar to a product designed in 1910 called Lefax. As you will know, the Filofax system did not gain worldwide acclaim for decades, and when in 1976 David and Leslie Collischon started a company to sell the Filofax brand by mail things started to move forward.

The 1980’s were the boom time for the Filofax style of organisation and the Yuppie (young upwardly-mobile professional) crowd clung to their Filofaxes as a badge of honour to show that their lives were important enough to require such an item. It was a time of huge greed and the endless pursuit of money and material items acted as a lesson to us all as the inevitable crash occurred a few years later. Well, it should have acted as a lesson, but here we are today in the exact same situation. Today the Filofax has been largely replaced by the BlackBerry and other smartphones, but meetings, things to do and all manner of other notifications to remember are signalled to us automatically by the familiar beep which has invaded our lives like a friendly form of tinnitus.

As computers started to encroach on our lives in a way no one ever expected, the PDA was born and two early pioneers attempted to organise our lives digitally. Apple produced the Newton and Psion came up with the Series 3, both of which opened up the gates to the field of dreams we consider the smartphone world to be today. The Newton was a bulky affair which included some applications that were way ahead of their time, but the handwriting recognition issues and price meant that it would never achieve a status outside of the crowd which would usually adopt something so new and seemingly complicated. The Psion 3, on the other hand, managed to bring all of the aspects of organisation a person needs to one small unit in a way which was familiar to anyone who required good organisation.

Psion cleverly mimicked the Filofax / desktop calendar look in its calendar application and also included automatic alarms and just about every other calendar feature we use today. There are many people who argue that the calendar application found on the Psion 3a and 5 series PDAs has never been beaten by any PDA since, and I am one of them. The landscape screen setup obviously helps a lot when displaying two halves of a day (AM/PM) and Psion took advantage of the available space perfectly.

I still see people using Psion 3 series PDAs this day, 18 years after the first model was introduced, and that sums up how well designed they were. Sadly Psion’s lack on ambition removed it from the mobile market and this made room for Palm to take up the reigns and present us with a new style of PIM to play with. More on that in part 2.

http://www.pscience5.net/ is a wonderful resource that provides detail on old and new Psion software, much of which is now free.