TIL why no-one ever talks about the Philips smartphone that was an #EPOC32 (pre-Symbian) PDA that slid onto one of their GSM phones - they never actually shipped it.
Given that I had one on my desk when tweaking the web browser for it, I'd just assumed it had been released 🤣 (I was adding support for the new-fangled <frame> tag that had just arrived in HTML, after the Series 5 browser had shipped)
https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com/phone-detail/ilium-synergy
Psion Series 5: the BEST portable computer? 1997 RETRO REVIEW!
-- Dino Bytes by Gordon Laing
Some #Psion news! #plptools, the open source suite of programs for transferring files to and from #EPOC16 and #EPOC32 devices, has some additional maintainers: @captfab, @jbmorley ... and me!
We're looking into how we can take the project into the future. We do have some ideas, but we're taking a considered approach to future development.
plptools currently runs on Linux and macOS (and possibly FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX, although these haven't been tested in a while). I've started work on porting it to #HaikuOS.
The repo has been moved to a new GitHub organisation, which you can find here. https://github.com/plptools/plptools
I originally thought that it was just a hardware thing - solder on another chip, job done. After all, the pads were on the board, so why wouldn't #Psion have made #EPOC16 work with 4MB RAM?
But maybe a 4MB 3mx just wasn't a priority for Psion any more. #EPOC32 and the Series 5 were in full swing by the time the 3mx was released. The two Psions were drifting apart, too - Psion's hardware business ended up refocusing on Windows CE machines.
Psion had the ramdrive working with 2MB machines since the 3a2. The code probably hadn't been touched in ages, and it might have been too much hassle to update for the returns they thought they might get.
This is all speculation, of course. But it would make sense.
@jbmorley FrotzS5 -- a z-machine interpreter for text-adventures / interactive fiction. The keyboard is excellent and there's many hundreds of games available and still being produced yearly
Attached: 1 image #OnThisDayInNTK:1998 http://ntk.net/1998/06/26/?arc debut mentions of: David Brake doomed Psion/Nokia/Ericsson Symbian phone OS "portable hardware [MP3] players" Game Boy Camera, Game Boy Color & Datel's characteristically demented "GB Game Booster for Sony Playstation" https://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2018/01/28/things-youre-probably-not-going-to-want-to-do-348693/
squelch41
Adrian McEwen
The Last Psion | Alex
Alexander Shendi
Kroc Camen
Jason Morley
Hugo van Kemenade