Of Psion and Symbian

For some reason I still love the Psion logo with the deconstructed letters and the industrial gray-yellow color scheme.

Anyway, it’s sad that there was such a massive opportunity for European corporate players to invent mobile computing, but together they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the form of Symbian (the evolution of Psion’s operating system, co-developed with Nokia and Ericsson).

The other day I was rummaging around papers in the attic, and found a black and white printout of an internal Nokia presentation from 2001 outlining their smartphone and mobile data strategy. It was striking how well they anticipated what users might want in the smartphone, but completely failed to project the technological milestones that might make those dreams realizable. The 2001 outlook was entirely obsessed with the limits of bandwidth and what mobile operators would allow on their network (i.e. how Nokia could enable operators to get a cut on all the content viewed by users).

Post-iPhone, it seems silly that they spent so much energy and engineering effort on shaving off a few kilobytes of 3G data here, squeezing apps into 1 MB RAM there, and so on. Apple was able to project the point where their desktop operating system (itself formerly a late-1980s workstation OS) could fit into mobile, and they also had the design capability to ruthlessly cut features to make that work. Nokia dabbled in all directions: bottom-up with Symbian, top-down with Maemo/Meego, but no commitment and no guiding vision except the managerial focus on cutting costs by putting the same old components a bit more cheaply into a growing range of colorful plastics.

When I was just starting my career around the late 1980s, I wrote a program on the Psion for a chain store in the UK that had 21 stores. Basically a person would walk the aisles and enter the stock codes and quantities. When they were done they would plug the device into a serial device. I wrote this other program in MS Basic (DOS) that dialed up all these Psions and downloaded the orders into an IBM S/38 Order and Inventory management system. I thought I was the dog's. I loved those devices.

I wrote a lot of code for Symbian devices once.

The system was extremely efficient on low-powered machines (by which I mean both a slow CPU and a weak battery). As far as wringing maximum performance from hardware-that-be, I have never worked with a better system.

The learning curve of the API was insane, though (and the system dragged a lot of ancient pre-32-bit PSION/EPOC remnants within itself). So was the heterogenity of the devices. Every new device required some rewrite of existing apps, and Nokia pushed out dozens of them. On-device debugging mostly didn't work. Emulators were clumsy and bloated, but still lacked important APIs, such as sound.

At the end of the day, the system was so developer-unfriendly that everyone migrated happily to better pastures.

I often think about this article[1] from the Register that claim that the Paion MX5 was the last computer built by one team hardware and software. [1]: https://www.theregister.com/2007/06/26/psion_special/

I started with a Psion 3 and later a Psion 5MX and now 30 years later I still remember how good the user experience was. The agenda, de contact database, the way you could make your own database with data that you wanted to lookup while on the move, it all just worked. At some point in time I even had a mapping tool, I think the precursor to what is now TomTom.

Personally I think that today an only iphone/macbook with just the default software (mail/contacts/calendar/etc) comes somewhat close to the same user experience. A Windows machine, while having a million different programs available at your fingertips, does not feel as a cohesive user experience.

> Symbian operated as a consultancy where they could take a reference design and adapt it to a customer’s hardware and give it a unique look and feel

If the author is referring to what I think he his, it was only a certain part of Symbian that did this. No other Symbian employees had access to that part of the building. Normal Symbian employees never actually got to see the phones that were being developed. All work their was done on an emulator (x86) and H2/H4 (armv5) reference boards.

This book details the politics that went on until the end https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smartphones-beyond-Lessons-remarkab...

I had the 3c and the Revo. The Revo was initially a revelation. I paired it with an infrared modem connected to a Nokia that enabled me to surf the internet and get driving directions on the move 7 years before the iPhone. Alas working with the iMac was a pain and the Revo would randomly lose memory due to a power system design flaw. At that stage I ditched Revo and Psion for a HP WinCE device. More of a downgrade. I purchased the Gemini PDA when it came out. It was marvellous but expensive and fragile. I now have a DIamond Mako and a 5mx that I play with occasionally. In hindsight the best Psion was the 3c. It was affordable, robust and just worked. It got stolen on a bus in Chile in '97. Otherwise I bet I would still be using it.

When I got my dad's old Series 3a, it was one of the coolest things I ever saw. We had a computer at home, so I knew MS-DOS and then Win 3.1, but it was another thing to have a computer in your pocket!

Then, when I was in high school, my dad was developing applications for the national gas and water utility companies and they used Psion Workabouts with printer attachments, since they were rugged and basically only device approved for working in places with gas. He wanted to get out of the business, so he basically said if I would take over the devleopment and clients, which I did. I rewrote the code for the Psions and wrote an app in Visual Basic for windows machines (I cannot recollect which database I used) so they could download the client readings via the serial port and print it out.

I never really got into "professional" development after that, sticking mostly to product design, but I still like to dabble in code. I guess the thrill of working on a product from start to end and have it used by so many people still gets fills me with joy.

Fun times and to think that this has to be more than 20 years ago is crazy!

I loved Symbian, because it was hackable. It had mShell and PyS60 that gave direct access to everything the system had. I remember backing up text messages and contacts using mShell.

I accessed a heart rate monitor via BT using PyS60. Both were pretty straight forward.

With Android, termux comes close.

I had a colleague who worked in Nokia, on a TCS contract. He explained how the team was devasted upon hearing the news that Meego would be abandoned and Windows OS would be used.

I was hoping for Meego/Maemo before 13 years, then Sailfish and then Ubuntu touch. I don't know if there is any hope of mobile Linux (not Android) anymore.

The problem is majorily a limiting hardware, than the software itself. We had a Sailfish mobile in India, but the hardware was very disappointing that evev if you could live with the limited software ecosystem, the hardware was not really useful.

I see the same trend with PinePhone and Librem.

I developed a program for the Organiser II which interfaced with a light sensor on the expansion port to record "shadow profiles" of tree crowns which were used to generate tree health statistics for use in forestry. You told the program what species you were going to profile, then walked at a regular pace in a straight line from one side of the crown shadow to the other and it would record a profile to storage, calculate its deviation from the average for that species and use that to produce a health score. Repeat this for a given number of trees per hectare and it gave an indication of the health for that section. All this was based on a theory (which I had my doubts about) of one of my professors and who better to implement it than the one computer nerd who happened to be studying forestry at that university? I don't think the scores were all that useful and remote sensing was starting to take off anyway but it did give me a chance to work with this device. At the same university we used everything from PDP-11's, VAXen plus all matter of other DEC hardware - DEC Rainbows instead of clones, etc - plus a host of HP stuff. Add the Acorn Archimedes a few years later, the Amiga I got for next to nothing 'because it did not work' (a single small electrolytic capacitor had blown its guts, I had one lying around so a few minutes later I had a working Amiga for the price of a good meal. I also rebuilt a CGA (digital TTL input) colour monitor I had lying around by designing and including an analogue RGB input, somewhat to my own amazement it worked just fine) and pretty soon I was doing mostly tech stuff.

Sometimes I would like to have a small laptop with black and white screen or maybe 8 bit color that would have extreme (measured in days) or almost unlimited battery power (solar cell?). Something that would have a C compiler for happy hacking, though I would like to have a Linux kernel on it. I am not sure about connectivity though.

We made huge efficiency and battery chemistry gains, but software is lacking. Though it would be probably a quite expensive device that only a few want.

I got to meet David Potter and his journalist wife when I was working at the Royal Free Hospital. He funded the Potter Chair position which my prof Dr Kleta filled as a nephrologist for many years. I have a picture of myself holding a Nokia N900 and shaking his hand.

At the time I thought he was the reason that the phone existed at all, not quite knowing the delicate politics between Symbian and Maemo at the time.

Still he smiled amicably enough and it's a treasured photo of mine.

Halcyon days ... interesting devices, ideas, and I loved my psion 5mx ... I remember hooking up to the internet while waiting in line at a concert and thinking I was damned business magnate cum console cowboy

I followed the story of Nokia, Symbian and Psion closely after that and the whole thing just felt like one of the biggest dropped balls in corporate history. Sad ... too many cooks, maybe ...

Oh man, I remember connecting my 5MX to a Nokia slider (the “The Matrix phone”) via the infrared port. Supreme geekery, ridiculously expensive, just to check that POP3 inbox.

> He was aware of both CPU and Sinclair Research, and he called them up.

This is one of those sentences that make abortretry.fail articles feel slapped together from other sources without attribution. Who is “CPU” in this sentence?

Context and a little digging reveals it is likely a reference to another early British company in the PC space, Cambridge Processor Unit Ltd. , described in the History section of the Acorn computer Wikipedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers

This random reference to a random company never goes anywhere is never properly explained in the first place. It gives the feel of something that has been quickly adapted by the author without much thought or understanding.

I had various Psion models in the 90s. Several of the people involved in the design of those things went to do modern-ish devices with Psion series 5-style keyboards, including the Cosmo Communicator. I was curious enough to back the Astro Slide 5G project, which attempted to "reverse the clamshell" to make a device with Psion series 5-style keyboard that closes to resemble a modern standard all-screen rectangular slab. It appears to have gone horribly wrong during final manufacturing at a Chinese factory that closed down during COVID, with thousands of IndieGoGo backers not having received their Astro Slide devices after several years (I am one). A shame. Anyway this article shows the Psion 5 and the Communicator side-by-side. That's a way out of date device now running ancient Android on a slow CPU, and sadly the refresh project seems to have died on the vine :-(

https://www.zdnet.com/product/cosmo-communicator/

[Edited for typos]

A great story from the dawn of the idea to the realization of the Nokia SymbianOS phones.

The subsequent M$ purchase of that Nokia phone division was one of the biggest damages done by Microsoft to the computing world.

Symbian Developers - quick question, if anyone here remembers. I think I saw something in their API docs a long time ago, that had some sort of pointer compression thing for linked lists, which look interesting at the time. It wasn't XOR linked lists, it was something else IIRC. Please can anyone shed some light on this?

I learned how to program on that PSION II! My dad brought one back from the UK (must've been '93 or maybe '94) and I got hooked. I still have BASIC (or I guess OPL) scribbles from when I was like 7 years old in a notepad. Nostalgia overload :)

I found my dad's Psion 5mx in a drawer the other day. They were really fantastic devices

I really loved my Series 5. That keyboard was awesome! I still have it, but the ribbon cable is broken.

I'd take a computer with a color screen, Bluetooth, running Linux and that keyboard - it could be fun for ham radio stuff.