I've said it before, (as have many others) but they missed the boat when dropping the Series 5 line. I know product development would have been costly, but the 5 was about the optimum - IMO the 7 was big enough to warrant a much faster spec than it got. Nice idea with the custom leather case idea though. The best advert for the quality of a S5 keyboard was that I gave my then new S5 to a colleague from the office and she was basically able to touch-type on it within a very short time, give or take a few minutes to learn a few of the oddities of using something with a lot fewer keys - and this thing folded away very neatly (used to be commented on by US Customs etc at airports as 'cool' or 'neat' on the occasions I passed that way, once the obligatory switch-on test was done).
I have two, one UK original and a US-spec 5mx, and have always thought that a colour screen (eventually HD?) with WiFi and/or BT and faster CPU than the 8 or 16MHz one they have and the product could have stood up in comparison to any modern device. Seriously - look at the way Palm always outperformed anything running WinCE/WM with CPUs boasting 1/5th the power and a decent optimised platform. The Psion LX sounds like the way it was meant to head WRT that though - even so, I loved messing about coding bits and pieces for the 5 - the SDK was sweet, even including an on-screen emulator. The biggest clue about the potential of a colour 5mx was that the emulator could run in that mode - but it never saw light of day (at least outside of the developers).
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Psion could have been at the forefront...
I've said it before, (as have many others) but they missed the boat when dropping the Series 5 line. I know product development would have been costly, but the 5 was about the optimum - IMO the 7 was big enough to warrant a much faster spec than it got. Nice idea with the custom leather case idea though. The best advert for the quality of a S5 keyboard was that I gave my then new S5 to a colleague from the office and she was basically able to touch-type on it within a very short time, give or take a few minutes to learn a few of the oddities of using something with a lot fewer keys - and this thing folded away very neatly (used to be commented on by US Customs etc at airports as 'cool' or 'neat' on the occasions I passed that way, once the obligatory switch-on test was done).
I have two, one UK original and a US-spec 5mx, and have always thought that a colour screen (eventually HD?) with WiFi and/or BT and faster CPU than the 8 or 16MHz one they have and the product could have stood up in comparison to any modern device. Seriously - look at the way Palm always outperformed anything running WinCE/WM with CPUs boasting 1/5th the power and a decent optimised platform. The Psion LX sounds like the way it was meant to head WRT that though - even so, I loved messing about coding bits and pieces for the 5 - the SDK was sweet, even including an on-screen emulator. The biggest clue about the potential of a colour 5mx was that the emulator could run in that mode - but it never saw light of day (at least outside of the developers).
Still not too late!