Ever since I got my hands on a Psion Organiser II CM some eight years ago I have been fascinated by PDAs in general and Psions in particular. Since then I have progressed through most of the Psion range including an LZ64, Psion 5, 5mx and a Series 7 and have been very happy with all of them. See The Psion File for more on my Psion love affair.
Like may other enthusiasts I was disappointed when firstly Psion announced that they were no longer going to make consumer handhelds and then that they were not going to include the EPOC operating system on their enterprise machines but use a variant of Windows instead.
However, unlike some others, instead of writing to my local MP to protest at the injustice of a Psion without EPOC I actually went out and bought a model, a Psion NetBook Pro to be precise. A this point I should really come clean and state that actually I didn’t buy the machine myself but my company bought it for me. I am in the fortunate position to work for a company, <a href=”http://www.appswing.com” target=”_new”>AppSwing</a>, that works in the mobile application “space”, so it was needed for research purposes.
Anyway, this machine looks like a Series 7 but actually runs Windows CE .net and is very much aimed at the enterprise market rather than the consumer. The 1000 GBP asking price also confirms that this is where it is aimed. I’ve had one for six months now and on the whole it has been pretty reliable but while I like the familiarity of Windows it just doesn’t have the bullet proof reliability of EPOC. Also it is a bugger to get in your pocket 😉
So when I saw a Psion Revo on ebay for a very reasonable price I decided that it was time to return to EPOC. I have no intension of doing much with it other than holding my diary and to-do list but I am pretty certain that I will be able to rely on it.
The only problem now is finding pockets for all my devices which include an Orange SPV E200 smartphone, a BlackBerry, the Psion NetBook Pro, a Nokia 6310i and, of course, the Revo…