David Potter, head of London NW8-based Psion UK Plc, launched the company’s new product – the Series 3 handheld computer heralding it as the Sony Walkman of computing. Within its class the machine has great potential as it is ahead of US and Japanese offerings – it is a 6 by 3 by 0.9 computer weighing 8.45 oz that has a multi-tasking windows interface and can drive a Hewlett-Packard Co LaserJet printer. Truly pocket-sized, it is driven by the NEC Corp V30H – a reverse-engineered 8086, has a high contrast 240 by 80 pixel – 40 character by eight line double layer retardation film liquid crystal display, a simplified Qwerty keyboard, a membrane pad giving access to major functions via icons, up to two 2Mb internal solid state secondary store running under the MS-DOS Flash File System, a high speed interface to synchronic printers and an RS/232 link to MS-DOS computers and Apple Macs. The system comes as standard with 384Kb of ROM software containing Psion’s own proprietary multi-tasking windows operating system, a word processor package compatible with Microsoft’s desktop package Word and a built-in structured programming language called OPL/w. Knowing that one of the shortcomings of Psion’s innovative MC range was its lack of software, Psion has gone to great lengths to make it easy to develop software for the Series 3. Applications can either be written using OPL/w on the Series 3 itself, or developers can buy a standard C development environment or an OPL/w environment for use with desktop systems. Meanwhile, a built-in script language and scripts ease the use of modems and provide a single key interface to electronic mail services such as BT Gold, MCI and CIX. Using the technology developed for the MC range, the Series 3 uses two standard AA batteries offering a a battery life of around 120 hours. On the downside for a handheld system pushing text as a selling point via its word processing package, the screen and keyboard are really too small to do any serious writing. Prices start at UKP200 for the 128Kb version, serial links cost UKP70 and and the parallel link costs UKP30. Available now from a good retailer near you.
