Successful remnant of Motorola acquires successful remains of Psion

It reminds me of one of the shittiest films I have ever seen "For Queen and Country" I think its called - starring Denzil Washington as a South Londoner (blimey such an awful attempt at a British accent) - anyway the only memorable part is when one of the characters mispronounces Psion as "piss on".

Urm anyway, whatever, mines the one with the piss on!

I used to work for Psion, programming the Organiser 2 (in assembler not OPL!) and I also wrote the code for blowing eproms.

I once wrote re-locatable (ie could and would be relocated in memory between opcodes) to drive a racal pager (plugged into the top of Organiser) to provide yuppies with share prices! Brilliant code, although I do say so myself, pre-dated SMS by years but Psion could never get the contract with Racal agreed.

When I needed a break from programming I used to wander into tech support and answer a 'phone. Most common question? 'How do I turn it off?'.

Good times.

Gone away?

As I type this my Psion 3c is sitting on the other end of the desk, though I must admit I haven't used it for at least 2 days now.

Happy days? - Still are.

The datalink is in one of these pockets.....

Psion II

I have a Psion II on my desk now, although I have just retired it after 21 years of daily use. It has been brilliant, and seemed indestructable, especially compared with much of today's tat. Some of the button legends are wearing thin.

Its only weakness was the lack of a back-up battery while you changed the main one (corrected in Series 3). It kept its data for a minute(?), I guess by means of an internal capacitor.

I was pretty nifty at changing the main battery (needed about every 3 months) within about 10 seconds. But in the last two changes I lost all my data. I think this must have been because the capacitor is losing its capacity after 20 years.

Thank goodness it used a standard PP3 9v battery form. Most devices nowadays seem to use a special battery form for which it is almost impossible to find a replacement when it fails after about 2 years, or if you do the replacement is such rubbish that it then fails after about 2 months.

One time the word processor in my Revo crashed

I lost a week of work too - because it was so damn reliable that I'd quite literally forgotten that you even *could* save the current document; I used to get saves simply by virtue of opening a different document.

Funny thing too was it reported a CBase 46 panic - the dreaded "stray event" of EPOC32 coding. This would of course be the now much maligned "Symbian" codebase. The other funny thing is that until Nokia borged Symbian nobody called S60 "Symbian", so the righteous wrath over the increasingly ungainly UI and flaky apps largely fell upon the correct shoulders.

And yes, that folding keyboard design was a joy - it even automatically exposed the docking station connector without any additional kludgy sprung doors (or just leaving all those fine contacts exposed the whole damn time). And the battery life was spectacular. In some parallel universe Psion seized the SatNav opportunity or started making cellphones and we all lived happily ever after...

5mx was a great machine but a massive failure because the screen cable was guaranteed to fail if you simply opened and closed the shell a few tens of times.

Psion knew about the problem, but refused to acknowlege it.

Their only decent recourse would have been a product recall and free replacement of the badly designed component.

They chose not to do that, putting them on the nose with people who the thing.

Biggest reason for their fall, IMHO.

Sad day. I'll be getting a cheque for £264 for my shares that I paid £1,500 for many years ago. If only I'd sold them six months later for the £15,000 they became worth at the top of the dot-com boom!

The best bits of the Psions were (a) The built-in apps, which were simple to use but with enough functionality to cover everything and (b) the keyboard/folding hardware. The worst bit was the screen, very hard to read in some lighting conditions.

If someone brought out a Psion 5mx format machine with the same keyboard but with a modern high-resolution easy-to-read screen, running the same old Psion apps, I'd snap one up! In the meantime my Galaxy Note comes pretty close.