Psion Lives on in the PsiXpda or the e-King S515

My first PDA was a Psion Series 3c. A classic. This was followed by a Series 5. Even better. And then a slightly mis-judged Series 7. Probably one of the World’s first netbooks; released in 2000. These machine were well designed and some what ahead of their time. In classic British fashion Psion managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and gave up the PDA market. They now live on as a supplier of industrial handhelds called Psion Teklogix. The Psion operating system (EPOC) was also ahead of its time: small, realtime, embedded. It survived as Symbian (much too much Flash on that web site btw.), which is now owned by Nokia and will be completely open source some day. Presumably the day Nokia decides to give Symbian up completely in favour of Linux/Maemo.

Anyhoo, the point is there’s a lot of UK geeks of an age similar to mine that look back very fondly to the Psion days. So it was exciting to see the PsiXpda (GBP 500) announced at CES. The company is staffed by some old Psion hands. Hopes were high. But on closer inspection things are not quite so great…

It’s running Windows XP

Windows is no great surprise. And I suppose XP is better than Mobile. But still it would have been nice to see Linux on there.

It’s just a re-badge of a Chinese product

The original is called the e-King S515 It retails in China for about RMB 4000, about GBP 360. So I would guess the guys in the UK are getting them close to GBP 300 and making quite some mark up. Oh and in China it comes with Linux.

So, nice try but given the rather obvious links they’re trying to exploit with the original Psions I would have hoped for something a bit more original in terms of OS and industrial design. I wish them well. If this is a success for them hopefully we’ll see future innovations.