Seriously, looking at it from a purely consumer perspective Maemo isn't all the great. The Psion 5MX was a lot more polished product.

Besides the terrific keyboard. The OS was very responsive. It had a really good document writer and spreadsheet program. It offered one of the best calendar software ever. The contacts app was godlike. It even ran the Opera webbrowser so you had a comparable browsing experience as desktops running Netscape 3.0 and the works. There were plenty of third party apps. And all in all it just seemed like a very solid & polished product. Maemo 5 seems so unfinished, so not consistent..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh1uBRH6n8E

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5

And no Maemo/N900 isn't the first device you can develop on, you could already program apps for the Psion5 (and earlier series) on the device itself.

The Psion 5MX was seriously one of the best minicomputers ever. Not Maemo/N900, as the Psion 5 MX just was so much more polished. I wish Nokia will deliver a much better Maemo @ version 6.

Had a series of Psion devices - was very sad when they stopped coming out with them

Psion sold software to Symbian... the rest is history

psion and newton, take two...

Dear holyshit, while I agee with you in that the Psion software was *absolutely* great, I think your comparsion is a bit unfair.

I myself owned a Psion Revo (slighty down scaled, but same OS as the 5) and that was definately a great product. But... it was polished because it had time to mature.

While maemo is the fith edition of the maemo or OS2006/2007/2008 operating system base, the version we have currently is litterally the first version released to the public of this itteraton.

Look at symbian or windows mobile. It still lacks some stuff the psion's did have. But.... in all reality, they also have a lot that the psion's did *not* have. And then again, there are things in maemo5 which are not in the other before mentioned OS'ses.

So it's a bit give and take. Every OS needs time to mature. Take linux, on which maemo is based. It has evolved to become maemo, which is a great thing. But linux 5 years ago would not have been able to do that.

So I agree with you that the psion devices where absolutely incredible and that a good replacement does not exist yet that is of equal worth to what they where in those days. But maemo5 has a very good shot at becomming "the next best thing" or "the new thing". Give it time to mature, and when you can, help it to do so, because if it does is partially in the hands of nokia and partially the part of us, the community, which I believe is a great approach to breaking open the mobile phone market.

Too long have we been locked, non-upgradable firmware, non-changable firmware, vender locks, restriction, bugs you just have to deal with, because the company is allready making a new model, want a fix, buy that, etc. etc.

In my eyes, the nokia n900 changes that ballgame all together. Screw them all. It's open, do with it what you want.....

My opinion off course.

I second that. That is IMHO the best thing about Maemo: it is pure linux, thus sky is the limit.

Even Android is linux based as well I don't consider it really open because of Google's interference with the JVM and stuff. I own a G1, tried my best to use the linux on it (had chrooted Debian, etc) but it never came even close to the power of Maemo...

(On the other hand the end-user experienced is much better, so far, on the G1. I'm waiting the updates for the N900).

There's a lot of ex-Psion users around here, just search the old posts since 2005...

I agree the Series5 was great, it was also closed and anything you developed for it died with the platform.

Up to now, however, the downside of Maemo's "openness" is that the software never had time to mature and fulfill the hardware's potential (770, N800, N810) before the new platform showed up with its own bugs and left the previous one orphaned. The N900 is one more iteration, we'll see what happens with Qt-based Maemo6 next year...

It's the fantasticly-capable application suite and the ability to extend and enhance it using the built-in OPL programming language that set the Psion PDAs apart from the rest ... as the OP says, the Psion calendar app (Agenda) has not been bettered on any platform since.

Oh, for my N900's hardware inside a Psion 5mx case (despite the bulk!) and implementation of the wonderfully capable and useful Agenda views (see the views on http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/epocr5), especially the week-to-page desk diary view.

The N900 Calendar is atrocious, compared to that. Even compared to the Calendar views available on my E71, with a 320x240 screen, the N900 Calendar programmers/designers seem to have come up with a way to display LESS information in a less usable format!

Still, I suppose it's a step forward from the non-existent Calendar on the N810, and - at least - there is synchronisation with external Calendars. Hopefully the availability of the sync engine and a standard database format on the N900 will inspire programmers to produce some of these missing views! If only I had the time available that I had >10 years ago, when I produced a few add-ons for the Psion world, like my Agenda Dump utility (http://home.spooley.me.uk/mirrors/ww...n/agndump.html)

Simon.

Yawn snore and im sleep.