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…

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 …

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 …

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 …

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