Dull Screen Dull machinel (Psion Series 5mx Pro)

Member Name: bewigged

Product:	Psion Series 5mx Pro
Date:	11/05/01 (1114 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: very few

Disadvantages: Dull screen

I have abandoned my personal organiser. It has bleeped its last bleep. It sits now in a quiet corner of a forgotten drawer, its batteries slowly fading, its lifeless screen folded in redundancy. A Psion resting in peace.

I had lusted for that Psion. Every address of every person I had ever met was logged in there. Their children’s names, hobbies, birthdays – cross referenced, of course, to the diary, with special bleeps for the day, and even more special advance reminder bleeps.

My first Psion, my beloved Psion series 3, had an entire section of the database reserved for research material. As a lawyer I had crammed it with every conceivable reference to a case, book, or a statute, all dated with court appearances suitably bleeped. It was perfect. And very flashy. Sitting on my bench in court, I was a master of the wigs. Tuned in, wired up. I was the most technologically advanced lawyer the world had ever seen.

I moved on to the Psion series 5. Somehow it was not so convenient to set up the
research information. The database function didn’t quite operate in the same way.
You could log the same information in the word processing programme, but searching for
that case or that reference was not quite so convenient. The addresses were as just as easy to handle and it sychchronised, after a fashion, with my PC, which was loaded with the simply brilliant Lotus Organiser. But somewhere, in my technological heart, a
technological bypass occurred and an enthusiasm faded.

In the end, it was the P.C.’s Lotus Organiser that did for my Psion. It kept reminding me of my battered old filofax. It had colour, it was stunningly simple, easy to read, a doddle to navigate, it linked diary entries to word documents to web sites to research notes to an
to an address book and even to your horoscope. It had an almost tactile quality. There was even room to feed in photographs of my chi
ldren, in full colour! Each time I returned to the small dull screen of the Psion, each time I went to navigate between applications or to enter urgent information via the small but beautiful keyboard, I became less and less enthusiastic.

One fateful, day, dulled by the grey Psion screen, I pulled down my old battered filofax. It still had the children’s photographs, cut to size to fit a transparent credit card holder, It had a sections for research material, a post-it notes pad, three year calendars, great diary displays. It felt good. It was tactile. The addresses were long out of
date but I quickly printed off updated address from Lotus Organiser – they even printed out on filofax size pages which they fitted neatly into the brightly coloured A to Z index.

The Psions fate was sealed.

I can wait. I can wait until someone, hopefully Lotus, develops a hand held electronic filofax, in full colour, with tactile hand written entry of data, room to hold post it notes and family photographs, colour index tabs for switching between sections or applications and as user friendly as Lotus Organiser.
I can wait. I made a note in my filofax, just to remind me that it might happen
sometime, soon.

Summary: