Useful yet dated (Psion Series 3mx)

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Product:	Psion Series 3mx
Date:	19/07/00 (122 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Quite powerful, very portable, good battery life

Disadvantages: Dated, bad keyboard

Last year I bought a Psion 3mx because of the lack of keyboard on my Palm Pilot III. The grafiti hand writing recognition used by the Palm machines is intuitive and easy to use but typing is quicker than writing. That is unless you know shorthand which seems to be a lost art and stopped being taught in my school from the year I took Business Studies. Grafitti is not shorthand though, it's only fractionally shorter than real writing.

When I bought my Psion the Revo had not been released and the new series 5mx was far too expensive. Had I waited I would have been better off with a Revo because the keyboard on the series 3 machines is not that good. The keys are more like small buttons and it is easier to type away not realizing that some of your key presses have not been recognized. One area though where this keyboard design does have an advantage is if you actually use in your palms. That is holding both sides of the machine with your thumbs hoovering other the keyboard to type. With a more conventional design it would be easy to press the wrong keys by mistake.

The screen is fairly clear and there is a backlight and contrast control. The screen can only diaplay two colours though, black and gray. Later Psion models do offer more grays. A timeout can be set for the backlight but this is a flawed idea. If I set the backlight to timeout after three minutes I would want it to be three minutes of inactivity but this isn't the case. The battery life is good too though and I usually only need to change them, 2xAA, once every other month. A standard calculator CR2025 battery is used for memory backup.

To connect a Series 3 Psion you need to purchase the PsiWin (or PsiMac) software separately which adds £50 to the overall price. A shame since this is effectively for freely available software and a cable, both of which come free with other Psion machines. Unlike the Palm desktop software which effectively is a dekstop versio
n of the Palm computers main utilities, address book, memo and calander, the Psion software just backs up files. You can synchronize this information with other specialized utilities, as with Palm, but the abaility to quickly load up Palm data on a desktop is incredibly useful and missed.

The jotter (memo), agenda and word (word processor) utilities are very useful and easy to use. The agenda lacks a very by month but compensates by views by day, week, year, list, anniversaries and to-do details. The data utility is a simple database which doubles as the adderss book and this is a let down. It is incredialbly basic and not much fun to use. The advantage it does have is that it can dial the phone numbers for you, although with mobile phones this is of no use. Sheet, the speadsheet, is also rather simplisitic but it is also very slow, even when there isn't much in the way of calulations. Inserting rows or columns into largish sheets is not recommended, and they have to be added individually because there is no option for multiple insertions.

Some commercial software is available although most new programs are written only for Series 5 and Revo machines. Shareware and freeware can be found on the internet and downloaded if you have the PsiWin/Mac cable and software.

If you just want something to make notes and keep a diary then this machine is perfect and should be available rather cheaply. If you want to use the internet or have a powerful contacts manager then you may be better off looking elsewhere.

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