Psion Series 5

» see psion.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

psion never had a turkish moment. the series 5 came out in june 1997 and got mailed home from london by people who saw it in a maplin or got it via a uk reseller. by the time i was paying attention to handheld computing, the question on tr forums was windows ce versus palm, not whether you could afford the british clamshell with the keyboard that actually worked.

and that was the thing about the psion 5. the keyboard. a slide-out scissor mechanism with full key travel on a device that fit in a coat pocket. people who used one for years describe it the way old engineers describe their first hp calculator. you could touch-type on it well enough to write a whole document on a train. nothing else at that size has come close before or since.

the series 5 ran epoc32, an in-house os written by psion. epoc32 later got spun out and renamed symbian, which by 2001 was running on nokia phones and on its way to several billion devices worldwide. so the os won bigger than any single psion product ever did. the hardware did not survive that transition.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually was ~

the series 5 was a clamshell pda with a 640x240 backlit grayscale screen and a real cpu, an arm 7100 at 18 mhz. on top of pim apps it shipped a built-in office suite called psion office that could open and save microsoft word documents, plus a programming environment called opl. it was a small computer, not a phone accessory. that was unusual in 1997 and got rarer every year after.

the series 5mx in 1999 doubled the speed and added a backlit screen worth using. the 5mx pro in 2000 let you upgrade the os in ram. that was the line's peak. the revo came below it as a thinner consumer model. above it the netbook tried to play in the laptop tier but got crushed by windows ce.

~ the postmortem ~

psion announced on 12 july 2001 that it was leaving the consumer hardware market. the company kept selling industrial ruggedized terminals for a while and held its symbian shares, but the consumer pda line was done. the official reason was that pdas were converging with phones, and psion did not want to compete in handsets against nokia and ericsson who were now its biggest symbian licensees.

there was no successor. the 5mx pro stayed in shops as new old stock for a couple of years and then disappeared. the dev community kept their existing units running with aftermarket batteries and replacement screens. some still do, which is its own kind of monument.

~ what got buried with it ~

the keyboard. nothing has equaled the series 5 keyboard at that form factor, and probably nothing will, because the people willing to build that mechanism for a pda no longer exist as a market. the closest modern equivalent is a planck or a tiny mechanical board strapped to a phone, and they all feel cheaper than the psion did in 1997. that is the loss the cult forums circle around when they remember this thing.

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