A radical move by Psion to halt the launch of the Blue Tooth hand-held computers has been announced. This shake-up comes after the sales of their hand-held computers and phones have dropped.
The massive restructuring of the business, means that there will be a loss of 250 jobs. The new focus being digital network solutions for businesses. Existing products will still be sold, but they will also start a netBook range. This means they have exited the consumer-market race and will concentrate on the business sector.
A drop in the share prices combined with the suspected US slowdown and the worst slump in the IT industry since 1985 means a downsizing project is the only logical way forward. The staff remaining will redirect their focus towards developing and exploiting Psion's IPR. There are more changes expected within the corporate structure
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Psion products
As a user of Psions from the Series 3 onwards I can confidently say that their products have always been superior to other manufacturers’ equivalents. The range of extra free and share software also has meant that for most tasks a PC is redundant now.
But Psion have not cracked America and have allowed the competition to release more trendy and high-profile products. The operating system EPOC5 (Series5, Revo & 7 genre machines) is excellent and doubtless will live on in other PDAs and devices due to its stability and healthy development core. The decision to scrap plans for future models is disappointing though as the protoype Quartz (EPOC6) platform promised even more compatibility & conversion with Office documents etc.
I feel personally that Psion lost faith in their product for some reason, needlessly. A platform that is instantly on and off, driven by a keyboard, doesn’t pretend to be what it isn’t and is reliable is a Godsend to many of us and is far ore than just a glorified personal organiser. As I said the software available allows web site suthoring, telnet, invoicing, messaging and database development. There is still nothing as versatile on the market so why have Psion just given it up?…. I suspect because the technology marjet is riding on hyp and not practicalty at the moment.