How Psion let the netBook slip away: a former staffer remembers
Former Psion staffer David Hughes remembers testing its netBook in the late 1990s. He criticizes its trademark claims and laments Psion's journey from innovator to intellectual proprietor. It has only itself to blame, too: it considered releasing a linux-based update while Asus was developing the massively successful Eee PC, but chickened out.
The netBook was another triumph of industrial design.As with the Series 3 and 5 PDAs that preceded it the netBook had a clever hinge that made the device seem to grow as you opened it revealing a keyboard that seemed larger than it should be. The hinge itself was wrapped in leather so it felt like carrying a leather book or Filofax. As well as an almost full size keyboard the netBook had a touch screen and solid state internals. Writing this now I realise that the Psion netBook really was ahead of it’s time.
A few years ago I bumped into an old colleague who showed me a netBook running Linux pre-dating the Eee PC and co. by some years. Sadly Psion didn’t release this version in yet another moment of corporate short-sightedness and cowardice.
Everyone and their kitten's making a netbook now.
Psion creates amazing things and then watches them fly, fly away: the PDA and the Symbian operating system both sprang from its loins
Psion and the Netbook trademark [David Hughes via Save the Netbooks!]
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My Mother had one of those netbooks. Lovely little device it was, a real precursor of the current netbooks in many ways; probably only let down my its pretty meagre processor and the WinCE operating system. The battery lasted for ages.
Man, I still have a broken Revo that I can't seem to part with, hoping it will magically recover one day. I've never been able to replace it with anything that cheap, portable, and typable...
Anyone remember this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300
I've still got one and use it. 24-hour battery life, monochrome screen with switchable backlight, idiot-proof (if fugly) OS. Shame nobody had heard of wi-fi, 3G or The Cloud then. Anyone fancy levering a netbook's innards into one?
No, thought not.
I always wanted a Psion netBook. The bizarre thing is that they literally would not sell you one unless you were a corporation looking to buy in bulk.
I have one of these and the 7 series that was its precusor there was one major problem for me, there was no way to hook it up to a printer.
There probably was a way I just could not.
Battery life was the BOMB. I would type on this thing all day long.
IBM made a small notebook back then too, it had a butterfly keyboard that opened up and got bigger as you opened the screen, think it was the thinkpad 701 - some time in the mid '90s I always thought it was a pretty cool idea.