Upgrading a 20 Year Old PDA

I have many of those here boxed; I was glued to them for everything I did when they came out. Very handy and long battery life. If we could put a Pyra mobile[0] spec into that, the perfect handheld would be born. Although; I like the design of the Zaurus[1] and particularly the SL-C860 even more but the keyboard of the Psion is far superior... Shame big companies do not find it worthwhile anymore to pursue it anymore, then again, it makes room for the Pandora & Pyra which give more freedom (in a clunky but quite usable package).

[0] https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bd/Za...

The actual project logs in time order are at https://hackaday.io/project/4042/logs

I have one of these, I got it purely to do a build like this inspired by someone else in the hackerspace. There must be a load of people that want hardware like this in and are in various stages of getting it.

I was reading some of the reverse engineered specs when the pocketchip was announced last year. My hope is to see more devices that fit the mold of what people want, rather than what will sell in the market.

It is getting easier to produce human scale hardware like the pocketchip, if we don't see more diverse hardware for more diverse users I shall be very upset.

Is there a modern version of this form factor? I miss this and the TRS-80 Model 100's of the world.

Cool story:

Psions outperformed so-called enterprise HP-UX machines in Java microbenchmarks when they were released.

I spent countless hours on this PDA with tethering over my mobile phone :) Form factor and keyboard was really amazing.

I enjoyed the Zaurus C3000 very much and ran OpenBSD on it, eventually donating it to an openbsd developer when I finished my fun with it -- a PDA that can run X11, very nice! http://www.openbsd.org/zaurus.html

I remember thinking at the time, "If only this were also a phone, that'd be perfect!" -- within a few short years, the iPhone was exactly that, even using the same CPU ARM architecture!

I've got a Psion5 recently, the software is very good. But the keyboard is not as good as it looks like and the screen lack contrast. But overall it's a good device.

I found my top of the line Wizard (nee Zarus) the other day and fished out some batteries and turned it on. So quaint, so challenging to read. What I liked about it is that it worked for years (and still does what its supposed to) for years without updates or upgrades.

I think if I was going to do a CPU swapout I'd try to use an ARM chip, that said construction was not designed for remanufacturing :-)

I have one here, still fully working! No way up uplink it to anything anymore sadly, long time since phones had IrDA, let alone dialup for the other end.

Not a hack, but the universal remote in my living room is a Palm m500 running NoviiRemote. It works better than anything else I've tried, and people are giving old Palms away; think I have three of them at this point.

Also, it's fun to tell people that it's my work PDA when they notice it. Beam me your business card. Oh, your iPhone 9000 can't do that? Okay then.

I have to admit, the idea of being able to run a fully fledged emacs on something like a Psion form factor is quite inspiring.

I had one until the display developed problems and this was a great machine for writing or working with spreadsheets on the road. Small, great battery life and fast.