Thanks to a short item on the All About Symbian site whose address I’ve had bookmarked since meeting one of the guys behind the site at the Geek Dinner last year, I’ve come across a quite surprising article posted to a Palm focused site. In short, the author of the article was looking for a replacement for his laptop, and looking at various options concluded that a second hand Psion Series 7 was a good option!
As the article highlights, quite apart from the portability advantages clear from the picture, the battery life is impressive (ten hours as opposed to four for the laptop) and the operating system is rock solid – my current Dell crashed more in the first couple of days than in years of running a Psion. The built in software is excellent, you get a decent word processor, and a personal organiser that is still better than anything on the present generation PDA’s (indeed for my Dell I ended up spending out for Pocket Informant to replace the woeful Pocket Outlook).
What it lacks are the modern connectivity options, so there is no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Aside from a cable connection there is also infra-red. However, as the article concludes, despite it’s age, it is still a wonderful solution for mobile working, especially at the current second hand prices.
Of course reading about the Series 7 has highlighted what I gave up when I swapped to using a Dell Axim as my PDA last year. The main reason for the move was to get something that could sync with the Mac, which through Missing Sync I thought that it would, although with the total inability of Missing Sync to work properly, I’m back to where I was with that. I was also keen to have something that, through Bluetooth could drive my mobile over GPRS, something that my Psion could never manage. It has to be said though, that whilst the Dell is able to work with the phone most of the time (although the Bluetooth software bombs out periodically), and can also work with Wi-Fi, the mail software and internet browser are poor – in fact Opera on my mobile phone is a better browser! The other thing I miss is the Psion’s keyboard, which like parts of the built in software still has not been bettered years later. I think as I said at the time, if someone produced a Psion 5mx with bluetooth and Wi-Fi, I’d get it tomorrow.
In line with that, I have been considering jumping back onto the smartphone route with the upcoming Sony Ericsson P990, however according to All About Symbian, that will be delayed to accommodate the M600i model, which although smaller, lacks the camera. I’ve already grabbed a copy of the emulator to play around with, and whilst it’s not a Psion, hopefully it will be a bit more stable than the Dell. In addition, all the other Sony Ericsson smartphones are supported out of the box by Apple, so synchronisation may be less of a pain. Like my current PDA it also has Wi-Fi support, giving alternative ways to connect to the internet. Unlike my current PDA it also has alternative methods of input, including a keyboard – not anything like the Psion though. On top of that, it includes the camera out of the Sony Ericsson K750i, so on paper it really does seem to fulfil the convergence criteria of giving me all that I have in my current PDA and phone, and a little bit more.