PSIONARA BABY

Dick Pountain/03 July 1997/Idealog 35

I apologise for devoting this column to the Psion Series 5, which also features on the cover and in Paul L's and Steve R's columns. What the hell, I'm not sorry, let's make it a Series 5 issue - Psion is the only surviving British computer company of world status, having sold over 1 million of its cute Series 3, so a new model is news. And I have a special interest in hand-held computers, since my entree into this business (two aeons ago) was a column about programmable calculators.                          

I've always had a soft spot for Psion because it ploughs an independent technology furrow, eschewing fashion in favour of practicality and good design, even if that means bucking (or more often pre-empting) international standards - which, given Psion's pioneering attitude, usually lag several years behind. For example when Psion launched its first Organiser back in 1984, there was no standard for ultra-small solid-state storage media, so Psion invented its own DataPaks, based on ordinary UV-erasable EPROM chips, and wrote an operating system to run them. No-one followed, partly because Psion wasn't a California-based Corp, but mostly because no-one else at that time even understood the problem. In the late '80s when Psion began designing the Series 3, there was still nothing suitable - PCMCIA still being at the nattering stage - so Psion did it again and invented the SSD (Solid State Disk) which was smaller, more robust and electrically more elegant than the PCMCIA standard that emerged 3 years later (4 before it worked).

Hostile critics have given Psion much flack over the years over the Series 3's lack of compatibility with PCMCIA, but the market has proved it right. PCMCIA has largely been a failure as storage medium, succeeding instead as the standard for laptop modems and network cards. Psion grasped two things that other manufacturers still don't see: hand-helds didn't (and still don't) have enough battery power to drive PCMCIA peripherals; and hand-held owners don't buy flash memory cards as bulk storage media like floppy disks, they're a one-off purchase like expansion RAM. 

It was the same story with software. I still remember at the original Psion Organiser launch, defending the machine against the ridicule of my colleagues, because its ultra-simple software let you store and retrieve anything via just two keys. It's taken 13 years to get back to that simplicity (though regrettably it's PalmPilot not Psion that got there.) The Organiser never caught on with the public - a few bleeding-edge yuppies apart - but within a year you could see them behind the till in every Marks & Sparks in Britain, and I believe Psion still sells them for such price-lookup applications. And anyone who has used a Psion Series 3 will tell you that its software is far nicer to use than Windows CE.

So now to the Series 5. To me, two things about it immediately command attention, one very good and one very bad. The good is the keyboard: Psion once again shows the rest of the industry how it should be done. The sheer elegance of the Series 5's slide-out keyboard makes you smile, a smile which widens when you realise that finally here's a hand-held you can touch-type on. The bad is that Psion still doesn't get it about Psion-to-PC communications.

The Series 5 comes PsiWin, as used by the Series 3, and PsiWin is just not good enough. It only synchronises the Agenda application with your PC, not the Address book (which matters far more to me), and then only with Schedule Plus or Lotus Organizer, neither of which can I abide. Unbelievably, there's still no PC-hosted version of the Agenda application (or the other applications.) If the success of USR's PalmPilot proves anything it's that one-button-press synchronisation is what makes a hand-held viable. In fact I increasingly resent having to press even one button: why can't I configure my Pilot to sync automatically every hour that it's in its cradle? I sit in front of my PC all day, I phone new people and record their numbers, I scribble notes, I make appointments, and I want that ALL to go into my pocket without having to think about it. PsiWin forces you to think about it. Long distance communication doesn't worry me so much (yet), though I believe that avant garde corporate users are beginning to want to read their email and browse web pages from a hand-held. Here too, by not having email and web software ready at launch, Psion risks giving the impression it's lost the plot.

According to some marketeers the world of hand-held computers is now split in two: the PC Companion category, which includes the PalmPilot, offers a sub-set of your PC data and functionality that you can take with you; the PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) category is a self-contained pocketable computer that substitutes for a PC. I don't believe a word of it. I think people really want both, but the hardware hasn't so far been able to deliver both. The Psion Series 5 has the potential to be both. Its new EPOC32 operating system is hugely impressive, superior in some ways (like its file system and task scheduling) to mighty Windows NT itself; next year it will be running on the 200 MHz StrongARM, providing real desktop power in your pocket. But without radically stronger Psion-to-PC software, it could end up being neither. I may offer Psion my new £850-a-head Executive Training Scheme; I take a bunch of designers to a country-house hotel for a weekend and pelt them with PalmPilots till they get it.