Why did the handheld units fail?

I see that the Psion was popular in europe but in the USA. Are they still? or has PocketPC and Palm overpowered them? Psion was a nice idea, but it lacked a good os. The HPC's are nice, but the battery life, and the size sucked. The 200LX was near perfect, but it lacked a decent os, and so on.

Newer PocketPC's are cute if all you wnat to do is play music, and watch movies, but for serious work, their limited battery life is unnoticable. Palms are better, but from what I can tell they are hard to read in the sun (except monochrome units), have a little bettery battery life thna PocketPC's, and are purely a perfect pda, except for the lakc of a keyboard. The thumb keyboards suck, and I doubt few use them. Hooking up an external is not the bets for bulk, and such. The monochrome palms used batteries that lasted about a month.


What are your views? Why did the Psion fail, or did it? Will it ever get in a major electronics store in the US? I've yet to see one. The HPC were there for many years.

This should be in off-topic...See the CE beat Palm OS thread that I made in off topic. There are a few reasons why keyboarded-units such as these failed. For one, I personally don't believe that they were marketed/supported well. Also, they do not have the ooh! appeal of the stupid ppcs...as far as palm, a quick search through the threads will tell you how much I dislike how they have transformed their devices. It seems that the keyboard handhelds were aimed more to a corporate environment, and that definitely could have helped them into their graves.

Today, palms and ppc's are toys that people play games on and maybe store (some) information on. No real use, as most people now store all their contacts on their cell phones. Palms were definitely more useful as monochrome, simple devices with a long battery life. It is ridiculous how little life some newer ones have, as if they run out of power and you don't have a backup, pop! everything is gone. The older ones gave you a month to get more power.

Sadly, I really do not know much about psion. But as far as hpc's, I know very well why they died. Regardless of spending what was it, 10 years coming up with a really good portable device, Microsoft has all but backed out from them. These can definitely sell well. I know this as a fact. When I showed some frieneds my 720, they wanted to dump their desktops and just use one of these. This *may* be a reason why Microsoft backed out.

There is a thread which I have not gotten to responding to titled: Were the hpc's ahead of their time? This I believe to be as absolutely true, as if the public had been ready for them I think right now I would be typing on a very small forum out of hundreds for these devices. Yet, we seem to be down to one. There used to be many sites and support for these devices, but Microsoft ultimately tried to ignore their existance, and has led people away from buying more of these in turn for those stupid toys! grr...

-By the way, if you needed a tool like the palm with a long battery life, then what need to buy a color one. I would still be able to do all my work on my deceased compaq (will figure out model sometime!) with no problems. We don't need a color screen, if these things are used as tools all we need is good software. And mine has that, but support is just low now.

Well it IS the Handheld PC General Discussion.

So if your question is "why did HPC fail"? I'd have to say that the needs at the time were against such small devices. As I also pointed out in the "ahead of its time" thread, the trends a few years back was having more and more on your laptop, not less. There, perfect reason why people have moved away from this form factor.

And I completely disagree that Microsoft was the cause of it. They don't control the market, the market controls them. And they would have failed as a business like a lot of other companies if they weren't so good at giving people what they want.

Edited by takwu 2004-12-15 1:22 AM

ProgSynth: My sentiments exactly. A M$ conspiracy theory ... kill the handheld and save the desktop.

Right now, with the market trend converging towards sub-notebook (or ultra big notebooks??) ... there is a chance that HPCs might get another lease of life ... through CE.net

But my guess is that unless some company come up with a super compelling desktop replacement HPC, M$ would not steers its PC OEMs to move wholesale to HPCs.

We'll see ... ...

Is that you asking the question John?

Psion left the consumer PDA market in 2001, and seems to me to be a company floundering for a place. They've joined up with Teklogix, a Canadian firm IIRC, and are trying to focus on corporate/industrial. I am somewhat hopeful long term, but do not see the logic of them selling their stake in Symbian...

The Psion OSes -for there were a few- were truly excellent, and I honestly think they are better suited to purpose than Windows CE. I would challenge the assertation that they lacked a decent OS!

The Psion OS is lean, efficient, elegant, resilient, powerful, functionally rich and fit for purpose. No matter how hard I try, I cannot describe WinCE as efficient or elegant as a PDA computing platform.

Looking at Epoc, the 32 bit platform, there really are some stunning features that are still yet to be properly implemented on WinCE. Take object embedding (OLE as it used to be known)... Psion supports that. Does WinCE? Hardly... And not where you want it.

Another thing I appreciated about the Psion 3 and 5 series machines was the engineering. Rather than just fold out, like every HPC, the hinge mechanisms were cunning enough to either allow the screen and keyboard to be well angled for use on a desk (as in the series 3), or incorporate a keyboard that slides allowing a bigger surface area for screen and keyboard to be used, and still have room for all the gubbins. It would have been nice if they'd been made a little bit more robust, but you can't have everything

If you ask a fair few people, you'll find that many consider that Psion hadn't failed, but that they sold out in the face of insurmountable competition from WinCE. Again, my oft-spouted quote from BillG saying "Psion are MS's biggest threat" can be rolled out here.

Psion didn't fail, but didn't have the balls or backing to take on MS at their own game. I suspect they saw that the HPC was being commoditised and becoming something low-value that people would want to replace with the latest and greatest every year or so - whether the functionality dictated that they should or not. Realising that they couldn't compete through their own R&D/manufacturing, and that their licensing deal (remember Geofox, or the Osaris? I rest my case ) had not really been a blinding success, they retreated.

A real shame, as their swansong organiser - the 5mx Pro - was really quite a stunning bit of evolutionary design.

They still continue to sell the Netbook, which is more of a laptop replacement in form factor size, though they've now moved away from the EPOC OS to Windows CE, which some netbook fans see as the final nail in the wonderful OS's (and Psion's) coffin.

There is a teaser site psixpda.com which hints at something happening in the Psion world, but I am not holding my breath.

If you do want to try the OS, you can download a full emulator which is a really great software development kit. Unlike the WinCE SDKs, the emulator really does emulate the machine, not provide a pseudo vm.

If you do want to try a Psion, your best bet is ebay. The 5mx is the model to have if you want a touchscreen, but for that retro 16 bit feel the 3mx is a great and arguably more responsive machine as a PDA.

I ought to write a history of these things some day... I've got every Psion made from the Organiser II (missing an org 1!) through to the Psion 5mx. The Series 7 and Netbook are a little bit large to me, but one day I'll invest in one

I think a major problem was the pricing of the units. The Jornadas HPCs came out at more than 800 US$ and that got pretty close to the cost of a laptop. It was a real struggle to get my 690 through the family budget process when I bought it new. When it died, it was a lot easier to get a 720 on e-bay at less than half what I payed for the 690 new. The price for a successful HPC will have to be within $100 US to that of a PPC with similar communication features, because people can get keyboards for the PPCs for that much (or less).

I think another factor was reliability. The HPC is inherently more complex (and vulnerable) because of the keyboard, and PC/CF slots. The 690 I had went in for repairs once under warranty and once on my dime - which cost almost what I ended up paying for the 720!. I know a friend who had a palm which took a dive into hydraulic fluid and, after clean up, works fine. I know my HPCs would not have fared so well.

The keyboard skin is essential at my house - things do get spilled. If it doesn't take out the HPC, it's only a minor inconvenience.

When I had my Jornada 680 I had the monitor repaired twice both times costing me a big buck. The second time I had it repaired it shipped back with a broken serial port. Since I was not in a school season at the time and I was not extensively using my hpc it took me till the school year to figure out that I had a broken port. By this time it was too late to go after the company that shipped it to me.
I then just bought a 720 on Ebay for like $500 at the time which was a good steal. The 680 cost me $610 at the time and that was a steal. They were retailing at Fry's for $1000 at this time. My 720 has worked flawless ever since september 2003. If it breaks I only have a few repair centers, because I believe HP will not touch these machines or is this incorrect?


John

PS- My Palm has been dropped a half dozen times, yet still continues to work flawlessly.

Palms don't have a separate screen held on by hinges.

Personaly, I love the HPC form factor, and have done since my Psion 3c days. I think the plethora of CPU types, incompatability between different CE versions, and lack of OS upgradability (and lack of support from microsoft for older versions) helped kill the platform.
It's a sad thing when a 100mhz/32mb ram machine (like my Phenom express) only has IE3 and the look and feel of win95 when win 3.1 has IE 5.5 and flash too.
Also, if they had stuck with one CPU type, and user flashable CE roms, things would have been a lot rosier.
Microsoft always tends to use the users and other companies to test ideas that it is not fully commited to. It produced a half baked version of CE for the dreamcast console, before abandoning it to release their own console from what they had learnt. OS2 and MSX are also good examples.
I think with the likes of the transmeta crusoe low power cpu, small 1.8 inch hard drives,and low power oled screens we will see the return of the HPC- but running full OS's such as XP and Linux. Personally I won't trust bill next time, i'll go with linux.



Edited by Khephren 2004-12-18 1:40 PM

and when companies do come up with cool HPCs with all the whistles and bells + long battery life, they price it close to a mid-range notebook $1k!! *sic*

Look at OQO, theirs is priced around $1500~$2000 (?) ... most people *want* HPC's lightweight size and battery life, but do not *need* and will not *pay* for it.

Due to the marketing to business, nobody knew about them. I have a mobilepro 880 and people are constantly asking me what it is, they have no idea what an hpc is. Also, even though people find out about the series, who can afford them beside business :-(

If it weren't for ebay, I would never have heard of them nor been able to afford one.

With the mini notebooks coming out, if the cost lowers, I can't see the hpc having much of a chance.

ya ... I'm with you on the price thingie. If not for eBay ... I would not have switched from my T3 to my MP790!!

Well ... I guess OEMs are simply unwilling to forsake the windows platform for wince since doing so would mean dedicating more resources into a somewhat dead-ended path.

Unless an OEM without any notebook products come into the HPC fray, else OEMs will also put the HPC as a companion product and not head on with its own notebook product line. Of cos there are some who will also disagree with me that HPCs are meant to displace notebooks, but its my own sweet dream. ... and as it stands, if I can rig up my simple browser to access normal hotmail proper OR some company comes up with a proper up-to-date browser for HPC2000, then I can safely use my MP790 without ever touching my pc or notebook for that matter!