On Thu, Jun 06, 2019 at 01:43:40PM +0200, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: > On Wed, 5 Jun 2019 at 20:06, Fred Cisin via cctalk > <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > > > I don't think that my Fossil (Palm-OS WATCH) does IRDA. > > I should find somebody who will pay me money for such a piece of > > crap^H^H^H^H NEAT technology. > [...] > > Now? No keyboards at all. > > No, I am not happy about that, either. > > I could read the screens of my Psion and Nokia in bright sunshine. > American-design ones are slowly edging back towards that, but it's > still difficult. Daylight-readable screens have disappeared from the > market. > > I'm not happy about that, either. > > My Psions and Nokias had bulletproof OSes that lasted for years > without a single update, and yes, they were Internet-connected by the > last few generations. They ran in a few tens of megabytes of > nonvolatile storage. > > Now, my tablet and iPhone and Android phones need *at least* 3 or 4 > apps updating every day. If I don't use one for a few weeks, it's just > like Windows -- I have to do half an hour of updates before I can use > it. The OS needs to be replaced every month or two to fix all the > flaws in it, and that's a gigabyte or so of storage. > > I am *furious* about this.
I share the sentiment and I guess I could give similar description (yours was very interesting, BTW). If I had a privilege to own Psion. But, when I went on for shopping, Psion was already bowing out of the PDA market. So I bought Compaq iPAQ 3630, installed Familiar Linux on it and hoped there would be a future when PDAs can be bought. Hoho, I was so wrong. But while researching, I could on one ocassion tap a bit on this excellent Psion 5mx keyboard in a shop. I think about this keyboard to this very day. About displays: my ideal display was the one from iPAQ (they were also used in other handheld PDAs of the time). It was called transflective LCD. They are easily recognized, because the light can be permamently turned off. "Normal" LCD has a backlight, i.e. a layer of leds/incandescents which shine through from the back of the display towards the user. Transflectives have special reflective layer in the back, and a diode on a side. The external light reflects and shines back through the crystal layer. Sorry for laymanish description, but I hope I have got it right. Anyway, such display looked best in full sun. The one in 3630 could display 4096 colors (with spectrum slightly bent towards pinky). Later iPAQ models could do 65k colors (again slightly bent, but this time much less visible). I used mine PDA as a proto ebook reader, lots of html and pdb material read outdoors. The same kind of LCD was to be found in many phones. For whatever reason, morons decided the shiny LCD should be next best thing. And transflective got lost. Just like this. Nada. Appears like the very meaning of "mobile" changed during last twenty years - first it meant "outdoors" and now it means "from one couch to another, indoors". > "The JesusPhone, I swear it is smiling at me: Come to me. come to me > and be saved. The luscious curves, the polished glissade of the icons > in the multi-touch interface - whoever designed that thing is an > intuitive illusionist, I realise fuzzily as my fingertip closes in on > the screen: That's at least a class five glamour." > (Charles Stross, /The Fuller Memorandum/) > > They're very shiny. They do a lot. > > But I had a better *phone* and a better *PDA* 20 years ago. The whole > is much less than the sum of its parts. Twenty years ago people using such tech were easily falling into "elite users" of some kind. Either because of earnings or because they had nontrivial needs and were decided to satisfy them - and the machines reflected this. Not so with todays users, and again, machines reflect this. I am rather baffled whenever I read Psion had milion users and yet this was not enough for them. Plenty of people would consider themselves lucky if their books, cars or games were bought by this many. The attitude of Psion managers is totally disgusting for me, unless I had not taken something into account. Perhaps niche technical products should be sold by those who understand niche markets. I imagine that if I came to manager of niche recording label and suggested he should get rid of musicians and start recording some generic crap outsourced from other side of the world to "reduce costs" I guess I would fly out the window with his boot in my arse. In contrast, I imagine that coming with similar proposition to manager of huge (so called) tech firm I would get a bl**job and some of his shares. But maybe I am romantic. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **
