Netbooks — David Hughes

25 February 2009

Now Intel Is Challenging Psion Netbook Claim

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

19 February 2009

Psion and the netBook Trademark

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.

Psion 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 they 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.

19 November 2008

A Tale of Three Notebooks

I mentioned in my earlier post A Quick Chat About Netbooks that I had had problems with both my Eee PC and a new MacBook ; so here, as promised, are the details of my circular journey from netbook to netbook.

When Jas interviewed me at FOWA I as using an Eee PC 901 and it was a nice little device. I loved how capable yet compact it was, but ultimately its size was its downfall. There were two areas, with regard to the Eee PC, in which I realised that size does indeed matter.

The first was the keyboard; I thought that I could and would adjust to its diminutive size but my hands are just too big and consequently my typo rate too high. When you find yourself thinking you’ll wait to type something on a “real keyboard” you know there’s a problem.

The next issue was storage. I didn’t expect this to be an issue as I had planned to store most of my data in “the cloud”, but one of the applications I use is the very excellent Dropbox which holds files locally as well as online. The problem is that the way Dropbox is configured to work on XP did not play well with the Eee PC’s limited storage.

The Eee PC 901 has 8GB of storage split across two 4Gb SSDs: the main faster drive for the OS and a slower one for storage. The 901 Windows XP installation is just over 3Gb which left just 1Gb spare of the main drive. Not a problem I thought with only 500Mb of documents especially as Dropbox allowed me to store this on the secondary storage drive.

However, one of Dropbox’s many great features is excellent versioning capability allowing you to un-delete documents and retrieve older versions. A brilliant facility but sadly the Dropbox client stores the version data on the main Windows drive with no way to change the location; very quickly the 1Gb disappeared.

I decided that it was time to change to a bigger netbook; bigger both in physical form factor and storage capacity. The new Samsung NC10 seemed to fit the bill nicely so it was time to wipe the Eee PC 901 and pop it onto eBay. Sounds easy right?

The 901 as with all netbooks has no CD drive so I had to buy an external USB drive. Once that had arrived I tried to use the Eee PC restore disc but could not make the 901 boot from the CD; so I decided to try an old fashioned install of XP. This process, which took an entire morning, left me with an Eee PC 901 that had two and a half copies of XP on it; none of which worked particularly well.

A wasted and stressful morning that reminded me why I moved to Macs.

The 901 went back to the store and I threw a, sadly characteristic, tech strop™ in which I vowed never to use Windows again and ended with me buying one of the new aluminium MacBooks.
So all was now well or so I thought.

The new MacBook is a lovely piece of design and engineering: solid as a rock and with one of the best keyboards I have ever used. However the honeymoon was short-lived as I became aware of the first issue with the new MacBook: the screen.

The screen problem is not, as you may be expecting, that it is glossy, and believe me it is GLOSSY but that it is simply not a god screen. Unless you have the screen at exactly the correct angle the colours wash out and text quality is degraded; sadly this correct angle often coincides with shocking reflections on the screen making the problem doubly bad.

I thought I might try and live with it, but combined with the second problem it became a deal breaker.

The second issue is the battery and power management. Many new MacBooks and MacBook Pros are experiencing the battery draining when the Mac is in sleep mode. Usually a Mac in sleep uses next to no power and can happily sleep for days. Mine would lose twenty percent overnight often meaning it was flat the next day.

At this point I decided that technology was revolting, at least against me, and returned my second notebook computer in as many weeks for another refund.

So what to do? Give up on a mobile computer? Stick with the iMac and iPhone?

I pondered this for a while and decided to return to my original plan of buying the Samsung NC10 which arrived at Hughes Towers this Saturday and I’m happily typing this article upon it now.

I’ll review the NC10 properly, but the highlights are: great keyboard, great screen and plenty of storage.

The perfect netbook? Well so far…