Psion Revo & My Ultimate Form Factor

At the end of last week a couple of people on Twitter were reminiscing about their old Psion devices so I decided to pull an old Revo Plus from my box of devices. The Revo Plus (A whopping 16MB of RAM over the 8MB Revo) was one of my favourite devices from the late 90s and it was truly a fantastic device.

However I’m not going to rave about the old Psion software or the old Psion user-experience (as many have done). What really struck me last week is just how fantastic the Revo form factor was. The folding device had a brilliant spring mechanism to unfold the device so that both the screen and the keyboard were at the perfect angle. The keyboard was also brilliant with enough feedback on key-presses to make it useful for touch-typing (though perhaps a little cramped).

Compared to the N810 form factor it’s a masterpiece of design. I struggle to make use of the N810s keyboard as it just feels fiddly and typing is pretty slow. In fact it’s so bad that I prefer to use the on-screen thumb-board when I don’t have my Bluetooth keyboard. This is especially telling when you use the N810 on a desk, propped up with the built-in stand. the keyboard is totally useless and you have to pick the thing up to enter text.

The only tweak that the Revo form-factor would need is a way of making it’s screen accessible for one-handed use. This could be as simple as sliding the screen back down the keyboard once it has been folded out like the original Revo. HTC have come close to emulating what I’ve described but both devices, the HTC-Shift and HTC-Advantage, were just too large and had the misfortune of running software built by Microsoft.

So I think I’ve decided on my dream device: A Maemo device with a tweaked Psion Revo form-factor. I wouldn’t even care if it was missing a GSM chip slot. Hard part over, now to get in contact with Nokia and get them to build the thing…