A Computing Quandary : circa 1997

Originally written on Monday, July 19, 2010

I have, as they as in England, some money burning a hole in my pocket. Not a lot of money, but a little. I also have a nibble in the back of my mind for a gadget I want to buy. I know what it is and I know what I want it to do. I want a small hand held computer that will synchronise with my large computer, will manage my email, do some minor office work and let me play a few games. Not a massive requirement. Not entirely onerous. And it must be a “hand held” device.

A UMPC, or Ultra Mobile PC, in fact. Yes, that’s what I want…..

A few minutes browsing through Clusty brought me to Liliputing, a pun on Lilliput, the fictional land described by Jonathan Swift in his famous travel-log Gulliver’s Travels, or, to give it the full title, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. Librivox has a very good audio book here. Free download released under the Creative Commons licence. OGG files and MP3!

It turns out that there is a slew of devices in the under seven inch category, and a bewildering array in 5.6″ and 4.8″ screen sizes. One of my favourites is here, a very swish Fuji. A good review herebrought to you by El Reg!.

And then I found this, The PsiXpda.

To be honest, this was not entirely new to me; I had read about it around six months ago and it intrigued me, until I realised exactly what it was. The PsiXpda is a device that mimics what is possibly the greatest hand-held computer ever made, in the history of history! A bold claim indeed, and not a fisherman in sight.

The PsiXpda is sold by a company that was created by some engineers from a company that can be said to have invented the genre of hand-held devices. It’s engineers went to work for and created the Tom Tom sat’ nav’ device that is ubiquitous on car windscreens the world over, one of its designers was solely responsible for saving Apple by creating the I-Pod, several years after the idea was rejected, the British firm.

Put simply, I am talking about Psion and, more specifically, the magnificent, Psion 5MX. A précis of Psion can be read here, and, if you are even vaguely interested in the history of computers and where they may be heading, I would heartily recommend a thorough read with a strong coffee.

But the device. Well, the device was magnificent.  It was superb. It would synchronise with a Windows machines, for contacts, tasks and appointments. It would manage MS Office documents. It would create office documents and save them as MS Office formats or EPOC files. There were more games for the Symbian power machine than you cold shake a fairly substantial stick at. It had a touch screen, which is something that moderncomputers, some 13 years later, are only just getting to grips with.

And it had a built in voice recorder!

It ran on an ARM chip that was designed specifically for this device; not forgetting of course all the hoo-har that is going on now about “fantastic ARM powered Android devices”, and, given its amazing “low power consumption” would run for two weeks, yes two whole weekson a pair of double AA batteries. I’d like to see an Intel Atom device, or an I-pad [pah!] do that! EPOC, the operating system written, again, for the device, was an incredible piece of coding. And for those who doubt me, EPOC became the operating system for over one milliard mobile ‘phones around the world, found mostly in Nokia’s, but a lot of Ericsson’s, some of those quirky Korean things from Samsung as well as a number of Uncle Sam’s finest, to name a few.

But that was not all. It weighed next to nothing, a few ounces. Not sure what that is, try here. And it has a full “qwerty” keyboard and that amazing sliding clam-shell mechanism that allowed the 5MX it’s legendary usability.

That keyboard was a masterly design that allowed the 5MX to be truly useful. It was not a toy. It was not a gimmick. It was a useful piece of equipment that was, to those of us who had them, possibly the most important thing you could have in an office, other than the chair. Or the kettle.

It would fit in a pocket and you could take it to meetings for making notes, taking minutes, rattling off a quick spreadsheet. The amount of excellent software that was available for the 5MX was staggering. Banking, plan management, accounts, astronomy, e-books [yes in 1997, the 5MX had an e-book reader!], the list goes on and on.

it also had Soccer Manager, a port from the Acorn soft game “Football Manager”, possibly the best management game for any platform that has ever been written! Alas, Artemedia, the company behind the game, are, as they say, no more.

Actually, there was a bewildering array of games written for the 5MX. Some of the best were the “text adventures”, a genre of gaming that has all but disappeared into the ether, with the advent of the GPU, 16meg RAM machines….. who wants to read words and, horror of horrors, think when there are graphics to enjoy! There is an entire generation of gamers out there who have simply missed the joy of the text adventure. Not if you were a 5MX user. They were part of the uniform!

I began to feel more than a little nostalgic for my small Psion 5MX. It was a truly amazing machine. And this, I am afraid, brings me to the nub of the matter.

There is a huge range of device on the market right now, from tiny little 4.8″ up the 7″ devices that are almost full computers. But, and this is the point, they are all the same. There is nothing unique about any of them, there is nothing that makes you think “that is what I need, that is the answer to my problems”. They are, mostly, clones of each other, running some version of hideous Microsoft bloat-ware, on, generally, Intel chips, that will last a day or two, at most. In most cases, a few hours.

So, I have decided. When next I am home, I will root out my faithful Psion 5MX, find that synchronisation cable, download some EPOC / Vista and EPO/Linux drivers and get the old machine back into life….. I will not be buying a UMPC, at least for the near future. Not until there is something better than the Psion 5 MX.

And the PsiXpda ? Made by E-King. China. Very sad.