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A year ago today: Psion harvest moon

Lack of cable cripples Organiser 5

We bumped into a spin doctor from Psion at the formal press launch of Windows CE 2.0 a couple of weeks back but he was at pains to assure us that did not mean his company would eventually produce such a beast. However, The Register took the opportunity to ask him when we would, at long last, have the ability to plug the very marvellous Organiser 5.0 into our GSM-enabled mobile phones. He said: "You'll be asking me next what my favourite fish is?" This was hard for us to understand. But a source not too far from the company now tells us that such cables are a fairly long way away and are likely to be available in Q1 1998. This puzzles us a little. First of all, why did Psion introduce the Organiser 5.0 in June, yet was unable to produce enough machines to satisfy post-launch demand until last month? Secondly, why introduce a machine which is crippled by the cable problem when HP reliably informs us that it will have a CE device available in January with such connectivity? Psion's answer is that you can, of course, buy the PC Card adaptor... We think -- although we're not sure -- that Psion was running so scared of Microsoft CE 2.0 that it wanted to put its mark on the market early. That's always a dangerous gambit if you haven't got all the components in place but perhaps Psion does not need to worry that much. The woman who showed us the full colour HP CE 2.0 machine, which runs on AA batteries, told us the battery life was likely to be round the three hours mark. She was unable to give us a price for the unit but it's going to be a pricey item. It's also pretty large and the keyboard is not particularly attractive. Which begs another question. Why buy a full colour CE 2.0 device from HP which only lasts three hours when, for the same price, you can buy a notebook (maybe not a colour one) which gives you the same life but has more features? This was from The Register issue 61 -- the cables still haven't arrived... ® Click for more stories Click for story index

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