Mail & Guardian reporter
Product: Psion Revo (32-bit ARM 710 Risc chip running at 36MHz, backed by 8MB of ROM and 8MB of RAM) Price: R3 500 estimated
Psion, the British manufacturer of palmtop computers, this week unveiled the Revo, a smaller, cheaper version of its Series 5mx handheld.
Even for a seasoned Psion user, two things about the Revo stand out – its impressive compactness and a touch screen much easier to see than the Psion 5. We get so blas about ever cheaper and smaller computers that it’s worth occasionally stopping and saying: “Wow.” The Revo is like a dinky toy that works like the real thing.
My on-loan model weighed in on my kitchen scales at 200g, compared with 230g for my (empty) coffee cup and 270g for my Psion 5. Yet it has more raw power than a computer weighing more than 50 tonnes a few decades ago.
It fits (just) in a shirt pocket yet has facilities for Web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets, jotter, diary, contacts, database plus a step-by-step menu for setting up, and e-mail that is the most user-friendly I have come across.
E-mailing worked first time through a (wireless) Nokia phone and the transfer of data from the Revo to a Psion 5 (or any other machine with an infra-red port) was awesomely fast. It has the usual Psion facilities for communicating with your desktop PC or Macintosh and can link up with the new generation of wireless cellphones.
The trouble is that technology alone doesn’t sell – as Psion knows to its cost with the failure of its Siena palmtop and the runaway success of the less versatile Palm Pilots in the United States. This is why the Revo is being sold as a comparatively low-priced style accessory in an indigo-and-silver case for the upwardly mobile as well as for its naked power.
It comes with a docking station for recharging its batteries and linking up with a PC or Macintosh. An infra-red modem giving high-speed 56K-bit access to the Internet is on the cards.
The downside? The keyboard is better than the Psion 3 but not as good as the standard- setting Psion 5.
However, it is perfectly feasible to type a whole article (as I did this one) if you work slowly. The other risk is whether Psion has overcome the reliability problems of machines that occasionally crash and have to be replaced. But the biggest risk is whether this impressive slice of technology will tap a mass market at a time when e-mailing and messaging is taking off or whether it will be seen as a postscript to the palmtop era.
Psion has also announced a free internet service for its users. The Psion.net service will be operated by LineOne, a British-based joint venture between News International and British Telecom, which already has about 400 000 users.
Psion said LineOne would offer about two million pages of information suitable for its small, monochrome liquid crystal display screens. The emphasis would be on news, sport, business and travel information.
ENDS
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