It grows on you
Written: Jan 05 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Stylish, portable, clean screen and lovely keyboard. Alarm clock function is tops!
Cons: How horrible to interface with file formats of other applications! And no presentation package - boo.
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| jurusz's Full Review: Psion Series 7 Smartphone |
I said 'never again Psion' after the simply dreadful 5 MX but hey, I can't resist technology and anyway I'm a long-time Psion fan (my first was a mark II back in the ice ages.) I bought it with misgivings, but I'd got used to an HP machine of similar size which had been axcellent to use until someone sat on it, and it was impossible to get a replacement. Enter the Psion 7.
It looks stylish. It has spreadsheet and word processor, which are the two things I need most when travelling. I hate its database functionality, and its address book and organiser: besides which, I keep immediate access stuff like that on my Palm V nowadays anyway. The biggest problem is the difficulty of transferring database formats between the Psion 7 and other grown-up types of database. I did once write a program to do it, and it was quite successful, but I need to swap stuff in and out of my portable notebook a lot if I'm going to use it like that, and I didn't feel up to the programming effort involved.
Transferring documents is not pleasant either: I had gotten used to simply converting a document into rtf and swapping it using a PCMCIA memory card. No, here you have either to translate it on the target machine (too bad if your target machine doesn't have the file translator) or else you transfer plain text.
And the browser is incredibly slow and rather primitive.
There is no game of patience to which I became addicted. May be just as well.
Having said that, I was able to collect big documents, spreadsheets and nests of web pages which I needed to work on and consult during my travels with success. And it's a great machine for writing first drafts, which one ends up doing everywhere and anywhere one has a moment for.
If anybody has a word to say =against= the alarm clock function (which seems to have been retained since the mark 3 days) I'd like to hear it. This is one of the best implementations of a time alarm I have ever seen. Psion obviously think so as well, since they haven't changed it much. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It's very, very good.
What do I miss most? Ability to store my presentations, so I could then just bring my Psion 7 to a meeting and plug it into the data projector, having quickly fiddled the presentation during the previous speaker's performance to take advantage of his mistakes. No, I still have to use a rather larger piece of kit for that. And I can't use it to polish up my presentation in the taxi going to the meeting...
What do I like most? It's stylish. The word processor is very good. The keyboard is stupendous. The screen is lovely. I mainly use it for drafting long reports, documents and memoranda to self, and for taking electronic copies of large amounts of documentation with me to meetings (using the PCMCIA memory chips.) I've almost finished the first draft of my next book on it: it was easy to write using the Psion 7 since I could get on with it in those spare half-hours and could just snap it shut when my partner asked for the third time was I or was I not going to peel the potatoes.
Jurusz
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
jurusz
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Reviews written: 6
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