Dream About A Modern, Revised Psion 3a

[kukacster]

I have a dream that maybe could be realised by openpandora: a new, modern psion 3a handheld. I liked very the psion softwares which were very simple and efficace. I appreciated very much its 50+ hours of autonomy. Is it possible with pandora to use it in reduced mode for simple tasks as text processing (no 3d, no colours maybe, no wifi etc.) and have 50+ hours of autonomy? If it could do 100 hours of mp3 playing, it could be do it maybe. Am I in mistake?

 

[benjiro]

I have a dream that maybe could be realised by openpandora: a new, modern psion 3a handheld. I liked very the psion softwares which were very simple and efficace. I appreciated very much its 50+ hours of autonomy. Is it possible with pandora to use it in reduced mode for simple tasks as text processing (no 3d, no colours maybe, no wifi etc.) and have 50+ hours of autonomy? If it could do 100 hours of mp3 playing, it could be do it maybe. Am I in mistake?

The 100hours of MP3 playback is because it will turn off the CPU, Screen etc, and use the "secret" :lol: power management / sound chip on the board, with a 64k buffer. So in effect, it will turn the OMAP ( CPU, DSP, GPU ) off, and run on a separate chip. Think off it as a ipod shoved in a laptop, and connected to the battery. You turn the laptop off, but the ipod can take over the task, and keep working without the battery drain. Thats at leased how i understand it works.

50 hours of work time will be over the top. But, 20 hours in theory might be possible.

One of the tests ran @ 500mhz, for 8.5h under full load. So, if you take in consideration that the ARM has rather good power management, and can downclock when your doing none intensive work like browsing, etc, there is a rather high chance that we can see 20hours or so. But this is just a wild guess. We need to have some more details figures of the screens, omap, etc power consumption for that.

So, the only people who can answer that, are the developers themselves.

 

[atomicthumbs]

a new, modern psion 3a handheld

Like the Psion 5?

 

[Karel Jansens]

I have a dream that maybe could be realised by openpandora: a new, modern psion 3a handheld. I liked very the psion softwares which were very simple and efficace. I appreciated very much its 50+ hours of autonomy. Is it possible with pandora to use it in reduced mode for simple tasks as text processing (no 3d, no colours maybe, no wifi etc.) and have 50+ hours of autonomy? If it could do 100 hours of mp3 playing, it could be do it maybe. Am I in mistake?

The beauty of the Psions lay mostly in their user interfaces and the almost insane attention for detail in both hardware and software.

SIBO (the series 3xx operating system) had one of the best keyboard-based interfaces I've ever seen, and EPOC (series 5xx and series7/Netbook) topped that with an awesome combination of keyboard and touchscreen.

The onboard user software was pretty amazing as well, with the Calender being simply the best ever. The Word application on the Series 5xx is about a few kb (yes, that's KILObytes) in size, and not only does it provide a capable editor, it has printing capabilities, object embedding end the rest of the bells and whistles built in. The Spreadsheet program is simply the equivalent of a desktop application in a fraction of bytes.

I would love to see an EPOC-alike user interface on the Pandora, but it doesn't exist and very likely never will, what with bloated desktop applications so readily available for easy porting. Too bad.

 

[greendots]

I have a dream that maybe could be realised by openpandora: a new, modern psion 3a handheld. I liked very the psion softwares which were very simple and efficace. I appreciated very much its 50+ hours of autonomy. Is it possible with pandora to use it in reduced mode for simple tasks as text processing (no 3d, no colours maybe, no wifi etc.) and have 50+ hours of autonomy? If it could do 100 hours of mp3 playing, it could be do it maybe. Am I in mistake?

The 100hours of MP3 playback is because it will turn off the CPU, Screen etc, and use the "secret" :lol: power management / sound chip on the board, with a 64k buffer. So in effect, it will turn the OMAP ( CPU, DSP, GPU ) off, and run on a separate chip. Think off it as a ipod shoved in a laptop, and connected to the battery. You turn the laptop off, but the ipod can take over the task, and keep working without the battery drain. Thats at leased how i understand it works.

50 hours of work time will be over the top. But, 20 hours in theory might be possible.

One of the tests ran @ 500mhz, for 8.5h under full load. So, if you take in consideration that the ARM has rather good power management, and can downclock when your doing none intensive work like browsing, etc, there is a rather high chance that we can see 20hours or so. But this is just a wild guess. We need to have some more details figures of the screens, omap, etc power consumption for that.

So, the only people who can answer that, are the developers themselves.


kukacster:
We may get a 5Ah battery upgrade which could be up to (a guess) 25-30 hours. Even 10 hours of playtime is a whole lot... and you will probably have access to a usb port or outlet or other source.

Benjiro:
im not sure where you came up with 64k buffer or any of that but pandora wont play mp3s with out either the cpu or dsp. mp3s are compressed and must be decompressed as needed. The 100hr estimation was probably based on how much power the cpu takes when severely underclocked and all unnecessary hardware off.

 

[cb88]

agreeing with greendots... there isn't an even lower power chip... only underclocking and power managment on the omap AFAIK

as far as that goes... laptops are building OMAPS into them for low power... which is what the ipod is i think at least the IPhone and touch are im pretty sure

 

[chiark]

For me, the superb thing about the psion was not only the hardware specs and the OS, but the packaging it was in: the 3 series unfolds beautifully, and the 5 with its sliding keyboard is a minor work of art. Mark II Pandora could easily be a refresh of the packaging taking inspiration from the Psions...

Ah well, I can dream! I'd love to see someone try to replicate the originality displayed by the team that designed Psion's hinges . And thats no disrepect at all to the pandora peeps!

 

[cbox]

Oops posted wrong thread.

 

[Firefox]

Even severely underclocked to 10MHz and 20MHz the Pandora would still be a smidge faster than a Series 5 and 5mx respectively.

I suspect that when you get below a certain level of underclocking the current drawn by the screen will start to dominate how long the battery lasts and there won't be much point in underclocking any further. It'll be interesting to do some tests on this sort of thing.

 

[rokdcasbah]

Even severely underclocked to 10MHz and 20MHz the Pandora would still be a smidge faster than a Series 5 and 5mx respectively.

I suspect that when you get below a certain level of underclocking the current drawn by the screen will start to dominate how long the battery lasts and there won't be much point in underclocking any further. It'll be interesting to do some tests on this sort of thing.

Has anyone said if there's a minimum stable clock speed? I'm guessing there would be (that is, it seems like you'd bottom out before you got to 20 MHz) but I have nothing to base that on.

 

[Chip]

I suspect that when you get below a certain level of underclocking the current drawn by the screen will start to dominate how long the battery lasts and there won't be much point in underclocking any further. It'll be interesting to do some tests on this sort of thing.
I suspect that you don't have to clock down very far at all to hit that point. Those old Psion palmtops got excellent battery life because they used low res, non-backlit, monochrome LCD displays. I suspect that the Pandora's nice, bright, high res display accounts for a sizable chunk of it's total power draw, no matter what the CPU is doing. Even with nothing but the display powered up, I highly doubt you'll get 50 hours out of the Pandora battery.

Perhaps MWeston has some power specs for the display that could clear this up a bit.

 

[kukacster]

Like the Psion 5?

I had it too, but it worked only approximatly 8 hours and had two screen cable broken. I liked the design and the concept, but the achievement was crap. Maybe the keyboard sliding mechanism did destroy the cables. I did not try it with the rubber cable offered by psionflexi... maybe I should do it... I hope pandora will be a lot more robust. I prefer robustness over fragile design.

 

[Firefox]

Has anyone said if there's a minimum stable clock speed? I'm guessing there would be (that is, it seems like you'd bottom out before you got to 20 MHz) but I have nothing to base that on.

Looking through the manual for the OMAP, it certainly *looks* like the ARM core's clock can be reduced to lower than that.

I'm not sure how that'd affect its interaction with the caches and memory, though. I'll have to have a good read up on it this weekend...

Those old Psion palmtops got excellent battery life because they used low res, non-backlit, monochrome LCD displays.

Yeah, as I remember the display was pretty readable in ambient light, then you could toggle the green backlight by pressing Fn-spacebar (or something?) So the backlight didn't have to be on to use it.

I'll have to dig my 5mx out and have a good play with it.

 

[Karel Jansens]

I had it too, but it worked only approximatly 8 hours and had two screen cable broken. I liked the design and the concept, but the achievement was crap. Maybe the keyboard sliding mechanism did destroy the cables. I did not try it with the rubber cable offered by psionflexi... maybe I should do it... I hope pandora will be a lot more robust. I prefer robustness over fragile design.

I think you might be confused: the series 5xx had up to and above 20 hours of runtime on 2 aa alkalines (considerably less on rechargeables, I admit). The series 7/Netbook has about 8 hours on its built in LiIon.

The screen cable on the series 5xx was indeed its achilles heel. I explained in a post long ago that the origin of the fault was the unfortunate location of the tooling holes in the flex cable. Psionflexi's replacement isn't so much made of a different material, rather than just designed properly.

For me, the biggest problem of the series 5xx was the godawful screen: I could hardly ever use it without the backlight on and even then it was below average. The series7/Netbook OTOH has a truly gorgeous screen, albeit somewhat limited in colour depth (which can be forgiven, in view of its age), but this shows in the battery life.

Still, other than the unfortunate snafu with the screen cable (and that danged screen!), the series 5xx is a marvel of engineering; the sliding mechanism is unbelievably sturdy and the keyboard is pure genius. Psion's keyboards are not rubber-based, but have under each key a nifty mechanism -- often called the "deckchair" -- which makes for a very tactile keyboard with very little key travel. It's also blooming expensive to make...

Those old Psion palmtops got excellent battery life because they used low res, non-backlit, monochrome LCD displays.
Yeah, as I remember the display was pretty readable in ambient light, then you could toggle the green backlight by pressing Fn-spacebar (or something?) So the backlight didn't have to be on to use it.

I'll have to dig my 5mx out and have a good play with it.

The backlight was of the electrofluorescent kind (or whatever it's called, it's the same as on the Newton MessagePad). It's rather energy-efficient, but has -- as you noted -- a ghastly green colour (newer "sheets" can be had in different hues), but the problem was IMHO that the screen was just too bad.

Oh, and the 5xx had a 640x320 screen, which is not exactly low-res, even by today's standards.

 

[TJFBryant]

I was probably one of the only Americans to own a series 5.
I adored using that machine ......from my late HS years to Mid College years it served me well as the ultimate portable word processing and business handheld.

Once the hinge's crumbled apart from over use.... and the screen started to show extreme wear.... It was buried next to other systems....like my first 386 and first palm.

To this day (with some execptions) I found the Psion to be the most user friendly, verstile handheld around.


I am hoping that a text editing system and email/ internet suite will be implemented with the Pandora.

I have been waiting to see a Psion Successor.....and although there are some other options I've seen.
This seems like a decent choice.......especially if I am someone who still finds excitment in using my old original gp32.

 

[kukacster]

Karel Jansens:
Sure, you are right, 20 hours.

BTW, I liked a lot to use psion handhelds: they were instant on, instant off, no long booting process (only once, at the very beginning).

 

[Karel Jansens]

Karel Jansens:
Sure, you are right, 20 hours.

BTW, I liked a lot to use psion handhelds: they were instant on, instant off, no long booting process (only once, at the very beginning).

It's really sad that progress seems to go mostly backwards, especially in the field of handheld computing. The best handwriting-based tablet ever -- the Newton MessagePad 2100, in case you wondered -- just celebrated the tenth birthday of its demise, and the best handheld operating system/user interface (Psion's EPOC -- Symbian has evolved into a pale shadow of its genius) will soon follow suit. There hasn't been anything even remotely as good in the last decade. Can anyone explain why, other than that IT companies are run by morons, that is?

 

[riosingh]

Psion put a lot of money into building and testing their units and they were built around these tasks.
Sorry to say this but the Pandora wasn't.
Maybe after we all install these apps on our machines and all bugs are found and software is better optimised. There might be some half decent apps for us to use.
I think a lot of people are going to disappointed. The nature of the home brew scene is such, that you just don't get stuff that works straight out of the box, without hitches, a hundred percent of the time.
I also think a lot of you don’t realise the man hours that go into making these optimised killer apps that go into even Nokia phones.
Software designers design them programmers program them then other programmers mathematically test that the code is the most optimised it can be. Then they are tested and revisions made and retested. Not to mention all the graphics and sound and all the other guys who I cant think of right now. And the project managers that co-ordinate all these guys, and all their tasks.
It’s a totally different kettle of fish from some programme savvy people porting some software. Please note I do not intend to insult any devs on this project. I highly respect what they do. But compared to the R&D labs at Oracle or HP, you just can’t compete with that kind of muscle. On the other hand the software on the homebrew scene is free or very cheap.
So sorry to sound negative this is NOT a Psion3a of the modern day, and if you are accustomed to using such works of turn key art, you will hate the Pandora.

 

[Karel Jansens]

Psion put a lot of money into building and testing their units and they were built around these tasks.
Sorry to say this but the Pandora wasn't.
Maybe after we all install these apps on our machines and all bugs are found and software is better optimised. There might be some half decent apps for us to use.
I think a lot of people are going to disappointed. The nature of the home brew scene is such, that you just don't get stuff that works straight out of the box, without hitches, a hundred percent of the time.
I also think a lot of you don’t realise the man hours that go into making these optimised killer apps that go into even Nokia phones.
Software designers design them programmers program them then other programmers mathematically test that the code is the most optimised it can be. Then they are tested and revisions made and retested. Not to mention all the graphics and sound and all the other guys who I cant think of right now. And the project managers that co-ordinate all these guys, and all their tasks.
It’s a totally different kettle of fish from some programme savvy people porting some software. Please note I do not intend to insult any devs on this project. I highly respect what they do. But compared to the R&D labs at Oracle or HP, you just can’t compete with that kind of muscle. On the other hand the software on the homebrew scene is free or very cheap.
So sorry to sound negative this is NOT a Psion3a of the modern day, and if you are accustomed to using such works of turn key art, you will hate the Pandora.

The Psion series 3a was great because it was simple, not because it had bells and whistles. I think I read somewhere that the 3a'a wordprocessor was something like 20 kb, yet it was good enough that I used it as my only (business) wordprocessor for almost two years (I was on the road a lot back in '95). Heck, my 3a practically was my only computer in that time period.

I believe we need that same simplicity for the Pandora: Small apps that do their thing well and connect easily with other small apps. I have on occasion promoted SIAG Office as something that might be worth porting to the Pandora for that very same reason (It could use a quick, Data-like flatfile database app to complete it). Let's not try to get OpenOffice.org shoehorned into it, because it is exactly that kind of application (big, desktop-oriented, all-singing-and-dancing) that will disappoint on the Pandora.

 

[mali]

QUOTE
I believe we need that same simplicity for the Pandora: Small apps that do their thing well and connect easily with other small apps.


+1 to that statement