I will never understand why we do not have this kind of device anymore. A small computer, running linux, proper keyboard, integrated LTE - it would be a messaging and writing dream.
Back in the days i developed custom software for the Revo, the SDK was a dream to work with as well.
But for longer messaging on the move (and occasionally other things like SSH for emergency admin) I find a small external keyboard (bluetooth or USB) and stand for my phone does the trick. You can also get keyboards with built-in stands (or cases with built-in keyboards) so you could use them while standing, though that isn't what I currently have. This has the advantage of not needing a second full device (my main phone is always with me) and not always having the extra size/weight of the keyboard in your pocket (as you would if you use a device with a full keyboard as your primary comms unit). Whether such an arrangement would be similarly optimal for you depends on how often you would actually need it: while having the keyboard for long messages and other writing is really nice when I do use it, it is fairly rare that I can't just wait until I've got a laptop or PC in front of me.
I find as I get older and my eyesight isn't quite as good that what I want for that sort of use case is an external keyboard and a monocle, or some other head-mounted display. Any portable device with a stand that's any smaller than a laptop means leaning over and squinting.
Hm. They look very interesting. Wonder if there's anywhere I could try them out. I wear glasses for mild astigmatism, and I've always wondered if that's a blocker. For things like https://brilliant.xyz/ that's obviously less of an issue, but also they aren't aiming at the same sort of display.
I had a Psion series 5mx and it was amazing. The keyboard was not quite big enough for me to touch type, but it was fast enough to take notes. The apps were extremely well made despite greyscale screen. Where I was, the most popular competitor were Palm devices. The larger screen and integrated keyboard made me feel like a king compared to those around me using Palm devices. I was sad to hear that Psion was pivoting to phone operating systems with Symbian and did not get a chance to try any of their other devices or form factors (Psion series 7, netPad, etc.)
Later I had a Blackberry Curve. It had the best keyboard and form factor for mobile typing I have ever used. The keys were smaller than the virtual ones on onscreen smartphone keyboards, but even today I prefer the physical buttons and cannot type as fast or as accurately as I could on the Curve.
Today I use an Android smartphone with Termux (https://termux.dev/en/) and occasionally bring along an external bluetooth keyboard if I plan to use it for more serious work. If there were a mainstream brand Android smartphone with an integrated physical keyboard, I would buy one immediately. There are a few off-brand smartphones with physical keyboards, but they are not well-maintained (typically running older versions of Android with few or no security updates) and some have questionable build quality and heritage (e.g. might come with factory-installed malware).
It's not Linux, but you can roughly get this form factor with mainstream devices without having to take a risk on small companies or crowdfunded projects. There are hinged laptop-style cases for the iPad Mini. iPadOS is generally good with keyboard shortcuts so that would be a decent combo as long as you can put up with the limitations of the OS.
Zagg sells a hinged keyboard that works with 7 inch tablets. I bought one alongside an Amazon Fire 7 inch during a black friday sale. Thought it would be fun to have a mini laptop for around $50. The two worked well in conjunction. Was even almost pocketable. But the Fire was slow. If someone spent all their time in Termux, the Fire might have been fast enough.
It's a pity the 7 inch Windows tablets didn't sell well and have largely vanished from the market. One could install Linux on them, and use them with something like the Zagg keyboard.
I guess there's one more possible option. Boox's eink tablets have support for BT keyboards. Pair the 8 inch model with one of the hinged keyboards. As long as the screen can keep up with the typing (I have no idea) that might work well.
> There are hinged laptop-style cases for the iPad Mini
This still makes for a very different form factor to the original Psion devices, which are much more letterbox shaped than most small tablets, more akin to phones. Doing this you end up with something more like a modern "netbook".
You could slip a Psion 3a comfortably into the inside pocket of many suits, not a trick you can do with many 7 inch tablet toting a keyboard case as well.
Arguably a typical touchscreen phone with a hypothetical hinged clamshell keyboard case would be a lot closer, but of course not everything works in landscape on an iPhone.
The short-lived Motorola Droid is some of the closest anything in the smartphone era got to the spirit of the original devices for me:
I have used a boox tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard (actually an iPad keyboard with hinges) there is nontrivial latency while typing, but I found it was quite manageable. It just forces you to keep more of the command or line of text in your head. I found myself writing on it a lot. Even did a little programming.
Interesting, when or which device did you try this on?
On my Boox Nova 3, typing via the BT Keyboard is pretty much instant, no noticable delay. Though in Word or Outlook it helps to choose the faster screen mode. No issues in Termux though.
Also its battery is almost dead, have emailed Planet asking for replacement (and how much) - and have been ignored for WEEKS.
Looking at online forums, some have been ignored for MONTHS.
Keyboard feels very sloppy. And some of them must be pressed very hard - while others register multiple clicks even when touched very lightly.
Forget about the camera - it sucks so bad compared to even a cheap chinese smartphone.
Just use it to scan QR codes at most, and even that it have problems from time to time.
I can second that. Had the Gemini. Never used it much because everything was awkward about it, from the lack of software/firmware to the keyboard until two years later the battery expanded and was bending the case. Not only refused planetcomputers to replace it for free, the only option they gave me was paying £125.00 and sending it in. I've asked if they can send me a replacement battery so I can do it myself but they refused, pointing out safety issues with mailing a battery - while asking me to send the Gemini with the swollen battery to them.
Waiting for Linux to be available on the new one, using Android with a keyboard isn't a good experience it's one of the least polished / finished aspects of Android.
It's a nice object though - if I could run Ubuntu touch it would be good.
I think I saw one of Planet Computers models or one close to it, and the keyboard keys felt like rubber keys with laptop caps glued on, not like real pantograph or scissors keys. I felt I dodged a bullet at that moment.
Looks brilliant - though a great pocketable folding keyboard and a 'normal' phone might be better for most people who want a keyboard. I had a brilliant folding Bluetooth keyboard that I used with my Nokia E61 before I used it with my Dell Streak - writing and editing text felt like a dream - but I could ditch the keyboard when it wasn't needed.
What's the battery life like? Every time I've looked for a modern Psion or TRS-80 Model 100, battery life is measured in hours instead of weeks which is a real bummer. With 30 years of improvements, a pair of AA batteries should be enough for months of daily use.
The market is too small. I had a HP Jornada 720, and it dramatically changed how I worked. I followed the several later projects that tried to continue with small size, touch-typeable keyboard, and desktop compatible OS, but they all fizzled from lack of market interest.
Just adding...I haven't thought about these devices for a long time, but now looking at the things that are available, I realize I wouldn't even want one now. Notebook computers have become so light that it's not a hassle to carry one in my bag, and suspend mode works well enough for "instant on". There isn't the great advantage there used to be.
Reddit is for old geezers, so I doubt any of the above answers is in any way in touch with 2023.
And I'm not sure who calls Macbooks "$2000 Facebook machines". That sounds like the ancient DOS era bs that "Macs are toys" (funny, the PC ended getting all the gamers and meat-and-potatoes OS needs, i.e. email+web, older people).
In the west, where they can afford it, a huge chunk of programmers, graphic designers, data analysts, video editors, musicians, writers, etc use Macbooks, disproportionally more so than the general public's share of macOS, or the share of those professions on Linux).
Actually, I'm not a youngfolk, and I'm not bothered by it. It was just a joke.
Well, as a macOS + Linux user (for almost 2 decades), there were tons of "$2000 Facebook Machine" memes around. I remember rich kids getting them alongside shiny iPhones to put them on their tables at Starbucks to "show" them.
I, for one, code and post-process photos on both macOS and Linux, and generally happy about how they interoperate.
Also, I aim to continue to keep this Linux desktop + macOS notebook arrangement indefinitely, because it makes my life much easier and enjoyable.
Well, US has a market share for macOS of around 20% and Europe of around 7-8% from what I can find.
I'd also wager the main culprit is the 20-30% price hike of Macs in Europe (in absolute numbers - it's even worse considering the lower wages in most of European countries compared to the US), rather than any particular dislike.
Perhaps if the EU eventually does something to sufficiently cripple Apple there, maybe Europe can be a hospitable location for a competitor besides Google to get a toehold someday either in smartphones or whatever the successor is. The duopoly sucks.
Lol This argument keeps getting reused over and over. The main reason Linux is not used is lazy sysadmins who only care to support Windows and MacOS for other employees. This argument has as much convincing power as "elections" held in separatists regions of Ukraine.
I do have macbook offered by my job, yes it's definitely better than windows, and yes i would take a linux laptop any day
I think you are not wrong. Blackberries used to be enormously popular. Same with various Nokia business phones that had full keyboards. Or their meego phones, which had full keyboards as well.
The formfactor did not really fail in the market but it just completely disappeared along with their software platforms. The thing that actually failed in the market was those software platforms. Keyboards were just collateral damage.
Android and hardware keyboards never really were a thing. I think there were a few niche models but none from mainstream manufacturers like Samsung. At least I don't recall anything that was seriously marketed in this space in recent history.
Apple actually sells keyboard covers with their ipads and they are super popular because real keyboards are essential for knowledge workers. But nothing similar is available for the iphone. There's nothing preventing that from happening except Apple deciding for their users that tiny touch screen keyboards are good enough when on the ipad, which has a much bigger touch keyboard it clearly isn't. I can see a contradiction here. That can't both be true.
A few reasons I can see that might explain why manufacturers don't like the idea:
1) it adds cost and introduces more failure modes (mechanical issues, keys failing, etc.). Apple knows a thing or two about failing keyboards.
2) it makes the devices thicker. Swappable batteries disappeared for the same reason. Once Apple got away with gluing in the battery to make the phone thinner, everybody else copied that and never looked back.
3) Android support for this would complicate UI and the touch keyboard appearing. That probably is a minor one and fixable but I given that there are few android phones with keyboards, probably not a lot of testing is happening for this. IOS seems to actually handle this nicely on the ipad.
Having used a few very robust Nokia models with keyboards, I think especially business users would appreciate a modern take on that formfactor. I don't think anyone gave this a serious try recently. Instead everybody seems to obsess about curved screens, folding screens, adding lots of camera lenses that mostly go unused, etc. So, manufacturers attempt to differentiate with features that don't really matter; which seems like it's a race to the bottom. But those same struggling vendors seem to avoid doing things that might actually differentiate them more meaningfully. Things like keyboards, swappable batteries, etc.
Don't forget that with the Blackberry there was a massive image factor: if you had one, that implied you were important enough to need messaging on the go. The form factor was almost incidental. As full text messaging became ubiquitous it lost its cachet.
Blackberries were expensive because you needed to pay extra for the BES Exchange Server Sync package, which corporate phones usually needed. The status symbol aspect of it faded because as it turns out, people do not enjoy being at the beck and call of their employers.
Android apps are just not setup with a keyboard in mind. Chuck an adapter and a usb keyboard onto your phone or android TV, and you will quickly experience how painful it gets.
Little things like weird tab order, or widgets not giving feedback when they are focused add up to a bad experience.
I don't think it's too cynical to say that business models (i.e. targetted advertising) of the Psions of today just don't fit with this kind of device. I never owned one but I remember ogling them and their high prices (to a 10 year old) in the Argos catalogue. Looking back on them now, the joy seems to be in how they strike what seems to be the perfect balance of dis/connectedness.
Could you make a Linux handheld that can run for 30 days on two AA batteries? Considering Psion made theirs 27 years ago, it seems like today we should be able to get a year or more out of two AA batteries.
A Kindle 4 runs Linux and has a 750mAh battery, which when multiplied by 3.7V gives 2.8 Wh.A single AA battery has nearly 4Wh, so two of them give nearly triple the capacity of a Kindle 4. A Kindle 4 lasts for a good month under light use, by suspending the CPU whenever the user isn't actively interacting with the UI. You could certainly make a productive Linux-based PDA that ran for a long time on AAs, provided you wrote custom software.
I loved mine back in the day. Also later had a Zaurus SL-C860 I had to order from Japan. I think that was the first computer I used as an eBook reader. Having a little Linux palmtop was magic back in the day.
I always lusted after several of the Psion models though, from the Psion 2 onwards. They were just such nicely designed things, even if you just looked at them as bits of industrial art.
A humble plug: the stealth mode startup where I work at is working on reviving the ethos of devices like Psion, Palm etc at a tablet form factor with a custom os. If you are intrigued, drop me a note at the email on my profile. Very happy to sign up folks on our email list!
The Beepberry isn't far off: https://beepberry.sqfmi.com/ looks like it's got a Blackberry keyboard. Missing LTE, but since it's just a raspberry pi zero, you could probably hack one in directly to a serial port on the GPIO. Needs a case though, but 3D printing one shouldn't be hard.
But I think the general market for this kind of device is really tiny; phones and tablets can do this pretty well, and appeal to general consumers
Companies don't want to sell computers anymore, they want to sell dumb clients that direct consumers to doing everything inside of the safety of their walled gardens.
I have the tech-fetish desire for such a thing, but at the same time I realize that my iPad plus its keyboard case is a far more usable thing. It's bigger, but the size pays for itself with the screen.
I guess if you're not interested in a thing unless it runs Linux, that's not a useful option for you, but for me and my purposes it's excellent.
I would love to see a good device with good (physical) keyboard too but it would be a niche one which would make it too expensive (would not be able to benefit from economy of scale). 99% user need a mobile device to consume content and may be make/share photos - mass produce smartphone/tabled (without a keyboard) works well for this.
A good onscreen keyboard, such as Swype, can be fairly fast... but horribly horribly inaccurate so I need to spend more time correcting the message than entering it.
The same is true of speech recognition. Quick, but so inaccurate as to waste more time fixing the resultant text than just typing it by hand would have been.
Source: I broke my right arm in mid-April and have spent a LOT of time and money looking into text entry systems since, including the very latest available Apple and MS Windows offerings.
Because it would be utterly useless for the 99.999% of the population.
And also because, like any dreams of that kind, it's better if it remains as such, you really do not want to see it shattered if anyone actually made such a device
Would beg to differ. Many people would love to a e-ink display (no color needed). It is better on the eye, and saves battery, and you can read it in the sunlight. It is not good for watching video, but I'm sure I'm not the only who don't like watching moving pictures on small screens. Most ppl just want to read and send text.
But it's just not how most people work. If you want to do something useful a MacBook Air, Windows eqv, or even just a Chromebook is hugely more productive. The keyboard is full sized, the screen is bigger, it's fast enough for Office (etc) and browsing, it has more memory, and it's not all that much heavier.
If you just want to read and send text, any phone will do. And it won't have the annoying slow update on e-ink display. (Have you tried typing on one?)
The Psions were nice toys, but not a lot more than that. I had a 5 and the build quality wasn't great. The pointer clip inside the body broke fairly quickly, and the covering on the device itself started peeling off.
The folding action was very clever and the software was decent enough. But I'm not sure I ever used it for anything except occasional notes and some basic spreadsheeting.
Its appeal was that it looked like a serious business-y microlaptop.
That was impressive when real laptops were still blocky, thick, and very heavy. Now that they're not, it doesn't really have a use case.
I have done programming work, for 'real things' (...) on a gpd pocket 1 for years fulltime. Works fine; that 'more productive' is just something you have, maybe for what you do. For me the pocket was (it broke) productive as I could just take it anywhere and it had 15 hours of battery life. My Macbook air I have to take out of my bag instead of my pocket, i have to bring my charger (battery life is good, but nowhere near 15 hours), I need a large enough table (in the airplane it's already quite annoying if you don't fly business), etc etc. I type as fast on that thing as on my macbook and i hardly use a trackpad/mouse anyway.
I would basically murder for an Apollo 3+ powered device with rLCD running on AAA batteries (the apollo is very battery friendly) with a keyboard. So like a modern Psion.
Now I use the Nreal with my phone + a MS foldable keyboard as laptop; still beats carrying a backpack with a laptop + charger (phone goes for 15+ hours) and it's a productivity win focus wise. Still would want something as described above as a companion OR powering the glasses.
Most people think - if I'm already carrying a smartphone carrying a second computer seems like overkill. If you want a better keyboard just get a Bluetooth one.
Back in the days i developed custom software for the Revo, the SDK was a dream to work with as well.