My New Toy
Before Palm, there was Psion--a British PDA in the form of a miniature laptop. It went through a series of models, most of which I at some point owned and used. Being hinged along the long edge plus some very good design--perhaps combined with a little black magic--gave a keyboard on which it was possible to touch type, at least if you left out your little finger.
Psion lost out in its competition with Palm, abandoned the consumer market, and I switched to a Sony Clié. It was an elegant palm style (and Palm OS) pda, but in important ways inferior to its predecessor. Typing on the Psion was easier than writing by hand, typing on the Clié harder.
Somewhat over a year ago, Nokia announced two new smart phones, the 9300 and 9500. Like my old Psion, they are in the shape of miniature laptops. Like it, they run on the Symbion operating system. Unlike it they are cell phones as well as PDA’s, capable not only of making phone calls but of browsing the web on a 600x200 pixel screen.
Both were triband phones in the European frequencies. Eventually a U.S. version of the (smaller) 9300 became available and I got one.
It is better than my Clie and more useful than any other cell phone I have seen. It is significantly smaller than the smallest Psion. But ....
Being smaller means a smaller keyboard. Whatever the magic spell Psion used to make its little keyboards work, Nokia has not licensed it. It is a very nice machine, but less useful as a portable word processor than the machine Psion brought out seven years ago.
So if anyone from Nokia is reading this, what I want next is ...
Enough increased size to make a keyboard I can (just barely) use for real typing. A 600x400 screen, about equivalent to the smallest size of ordinary computer screen. I am willing to live with something a little bigger than most cell phones. It would still be a lot smaller than a laptop.
Surely I can't be the only one.