
Carphone Whorehouse
ARM design great chips, and between them and the software Psion wrote to run on them, the behinds of early WinCE devices were whipped red raw by the Series 5, but after the Carphone Warehouse's experience of Linux, I'm left wondering whether it matters that someone can produce technically superior netbooks if the public will balk at the sight of them?
Perhaps the absence of companies like Psion and Palm has led to an unexpected side effect - people are no longer used to anything different in the mass market so they don't have the patience to give something new a try. Unless it's from Apple of course, then it's a wonderful new paradigm in human-fruit information interchange, even though most users only barely know how to make phone calls on it.
It's a shame that Psion's own netBook™ and netPad ranges never survived, I'm sure they'd be quite incredible machines today with wi-fi, touchscreens, 8 hours of battery life and an all-singing-and-dancing ER10.
As with the MC laptops of the 1980s, it seems Psion were 10 years too early again.