Comment Re:Hormel and Adobe (Score 2, Interesting) 234
OPL for a start. It was a surprisingly robust language back in the day, although when I created a stock control reporting app (the Psion dumped its data to a CSV file that was read into dBase for DOS - high tech shit indeed) in OPL on the Psion II (yeah, yeah, get off my lawn you damned kids) access to a UV EPROM eraser was almost mandatory...
OK, I'm joking. I think it's more likely to be "not pretending it's something it isn't." Small sub-notebooks (and these are not a new idea- the Tosh Libretto was a fair example of the genre, although "cheap" from the SCC acronym was never something you could apply to a Libretto) are either woefully inadequate for anything more than a little web surfing, e-mailing and putzing around with a few productivity apps or just too small to be thermally stable and have decent battery life. I think the reason for the popularity of these devices right now has little to do with the form-factor, as we've established it is not new, but more the parallel proliferation of affordable mobile connectivity. Who the hell wants to lug about a full 7 or 8 lb notebook just to check the twits on twitter?
Psions were presented as a small, neat form-factor with a small, neat embedded OS that was useful for a small subset of what a larger machine could do and, more importantly, were ready for use right after you hit that power button and only required another press to go into almost full off (the RTC remained powered, the memory was, if I recall, non-volatile). They also had battery life that wipes the floor with anything about today; a Psion 3 ran for what seemed like ever on two AAs - providing the battery cover didn't fall off, the sight of batteries rolling off being a familiar one to Psion 3 users. Not sure about the 5mx as I never was fortunate enough to own one. The Psions, however, never pretended to be fully featured machines in small cases, something some of these "netbook" manufacturers are guilty of portraying their wares as and I think that was the GP's point. Why do we need a full Windows or Linpus install when something like the Asus ExpressGate (Splashtop) with a bit of storage would do just as well and be available far faster and less power hungry to boot? That's the sort of thing Psion (the original version) would have been more than likely to come up with had they progressed logically with what they were so good at and "netBook" would have been an ideal name for the thing as that's what you'd do with it: Open it, tweet on the bus describing the liver spots (one of which looks like Australia) on the back of the bald guy's head sitting in front of you, close it and get on with getting to wherever you're going. Sadly, (or, perhaps, luckily for the rest of us) it was not to be.
That said, this does sound to me more like "we missed the boat, so let's get some money off these bastards" chagrin than Psion actually wanting to use the mark again. They should be used to it by now; if The Register is to be believed, they missed quite a few boats.