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Following my post The Best Camera I was keen to try an up to date camera phone; so I got in touch Sony Ericsson to see if I could borrow a C902 for review. It seems that the C902 is a now couple of years old now, and so Sony Ericsson don’t feel it’s representative of their current products. This being the case they kindly offered me a Satio for review.

Now I will admit to being out of touch with all mobile phones except those from sunny Cupertino so I was gobsmacked to find that the Satio includes a 12 megapixel digital camera. 12 megapixels in a phone – that’s incredible.

However as we all know there is so much more to digital camera quality than mere megapixels, but Sony Ericsson have always had great cameras so I’m really looking forward to trying out the phone and its camera.

I love my iPhone, I really do, but every now and then I find myself hankering for something simpler, smaller and well just different. I think the new Sony Ericsson Xperia Pureness could stop that hankering.

The display is monochrome (gasp) but also transparent as demonstrated in this video:

The keyboard is invisible until activated; so half the phone is transparent while the other half is invisible.

Amazingly the Xperia Pureness is an HSDPA phone and has a web browser, although I’m not sure how good the browsing experience will be on a mono transparent screen, but then again I guess that’s not the point. The Xperia Pureness doesn’t even have a camera, but it does have access to a concierge service à la Vertu.

The only problem…the price: £600 and only from Selfridges.

I know I said I was taking a break but there is a conclusion to the Psion netbook trademark fiasco that I felt I should publish for completeness.

It seems that Psion and Intel have reached an “amicable agreement” and that

Neither party accepted any liability. In light of this amicable agreement, Psion has agreed to waive all its rights against third parties in respect of past, current or future use of the ‘Netbook’ term.

I don’t know what deal was done, but I don’t feel that this rather grubby episode has done anything but tarnish Psion’s already diminishing reputation. Shame.

Intel vs Psion

Intel are joining Dell in challenging Psion’s claim to the netbook trademark.

I realise that Dell and Intel’s motives are purely commercial, but I dislike the patent and trademark litigation culture that has grown alongside the technology industry. I agree wholeheartedly that companies ideas and designs should be protected but only when their claims are real and genuine.

I would have thought more of Psion had they contested the netbook trademark as soon as it started being applied to the new generation of netbooks. Instead they waited for it to become thoroughly embedded before doing so. I would have though even more of them if they had released an updated version of the netBook.

It’s too late Psion the netbook horse has bolted.

Via Liliputing

As an ex-Psion employee I was disappointed and a little saddened to learn of Psion’s spurious trademark claim to the word netbook. Psion were once a great technology company practically inventing the PDA , creating some classic hardware designs and creating the operating system that powers a huge proporation of today’s smartphones: Symbian.

Psion launched the Psion netBook (also badged a Series 7) in 1999. The netBook was a sub-notebook running Psion’s EPOC operating system and discontinued in 2003.

I remember playing with a pre-production netBook giving my feedback as to how I felt the EPOC OS should be adapted to work on the bigger screen and thinking we had a very cool device here. Psion used external design consultants Therefore for their hardware design, and the netBook was another triumph of industrial design.

As with the Series 3 and 5 PDAs that preceded it the netBook had a clever hinge that made the device seem to grow as you opened it revealing a keyboard that seemed larger than it should be. The hinge itself was wrapped in leather so it felt like carrying a leather book or Filofax. As well as an almost full size keyboard the netBook had a touch screen and solid state internals. Writing this now I realise that the Psion netBook really was ahead of it’s time.

A few years ago I bumped into an old colleague who showed me a netBook running Linux pre-dating the Eee PC and co. by some years. Sadly Psion didn’t release this version in yet another moment of corporate short-sightedness and cowardice.

Palm chickened out of the two hottest personal technology markets despite having a massive head start on the competition. I was fortunate to see the designs and concepts for a range of smartphones Psion were working on but ultimately didn’t develop. Then of course Psion pulled out of the PDA market saying they couldn’t beat Palm.

Psion are now a pale imitation of the once great innovators they were; based in Canada Psion Teklogix now produce rugged industrial handheld computers. So their decision to claim the netbook trademark and to threaten websites, resellers and IT manufacturers with legal action felt like the last dieing actions of once great brand.

Shame on you Psion.

But well done Dell for challenging this ridiculous claim; it looks like game over for Psion before they’ve even started.

Update: Dell have accused Psion of “fraudulently” claiming the trademark netbook was still in use.

Note: I was also amazed to see that design of the Psion Teklogix site is largely the same as the one I left behind when I left Psion in 2000 and it was out of date then.

You may have seen the news that Google has added a tasks application to its Gmail email service.Well the even better news is that since they recently added Google Labs to Google Apps email I get to play with it also.

I’ve tried a number of task apps over the years and not found one that I could stick with and met my varied but rather basic needs but tasks from Google looks promising.

I like that it is in my email but can also be “popped out” to float as it’s own window.

I like that because it is web based I can access from both my iMac and my Samsung NC10 running XP.

I like that you can easily make an email a task; most of my tasks seem to arrive via email.

I really like its simplicity: tasks, sub tasks, due dates and that’s about it.

I rather hope that Google don’t develop it much further than this, but if they do they make new features configurable. I’ve been put off other task applications by the complexity or multiple stages of simply adding a task and would hate to see that happen here.

Additions I would like to see are:
- the ability to view and edit tasks from my iPhone
- a “quick add” function like that found in Google Calendar
- some kind of self-contained tasks view which could be off-line via Google Gears.

I love the almost constant upgrades and additions that Google makes to its services such as Gmail, Docs, Google Apps etc. particularly when you consider they are all free.