When I wrote about the PsiXpda I made a snarky reference to the long time it was taking for Nokia to release Symbian as open source. Well, what do you know? As soon as I write about it they go open source. Apparently ahead of schedule - though that seems a bit arbitrary since (if I recall correctly) when they started there was no schedule. And the Symbian Source page says… “Not all of the code is yet available under open source licences.” Odd that.

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.…

Playing around with the Sony Ericsson S500c, I tried out the built-in MusicDJ app. Similiar to GarageBand it allows the user to build up a song in blocks. It’s a bit fiddly trying to compose on such a small screen and it’s really something that you need to do either with headphones on or away from other people. MusicDJ uses MIDI rather than real audio clips to keep the file sizes small but it is possible to convert to audio as follows. I transferred the file to my Mac (by emailing it to myself from the phone)…