In 1984, there was one company whose vision was far beyond any other. This company wanted to put a computer complete with a screen, keyboard, solid state storage, and software in the user’s pocket.
David Edwin Potter was born in East London, South Africa in 1943. He was raised in Cape Town, and started his academic life at the University of Cape Town in 1962. After a year, he’d earned a Beit Scholarship and began studying natural sciences at Cambridge. Potter’s academic excellence was apparently rivaled by very few as he was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to continue his education at Imperial College London. He earned his doctorate in computational physics, joined the staff, and wrote a textbook that remained on the Oxford reading list for over thirty years. He taught at the University of London and the University of California during the 1970s.
Given his educational background and academic career, Potter was around a variety of mainframe machines and minicomputers. When the microprocessor was invented and varieties of chips were made available for retail purchase, Potter immediately recognized the impact that these devices would have, or at the very least, could have. Potter began reading computer magazines, researching the market, and attempting to identify opportunities while earning money in a variety of ways: driving trucks, selling encyclopedias, selling ice cream. He was aware of both CPU and Sinclair Research, and he called them up. What he saw was a seemingly endless market for software, and he also noticed that there were already people writing software. So, Potter approached those folks and offered a non-exclusive deal in which he’d package their software and sell it more widely taking twelve percent for himself. For this endeavor, Potter started a company, Psion, in 1980. The name somewhat unofficially stood for Potter Scientific Instruments Or Nothing, but this was due to PSI having already been a business name; officially, the name was just Psion. His first offices were located on Baker Street in London, most of his early employees were former students of his, and the company had little money resorting to renting a typewriter as they lacked the funds for anything else.
The first majorly successful products sold by Psion were games developed in-house for the Sinclair ZX81. Among these, FLIGHT Simulation, was particularly impressive. The ZX81 used a Zilog Z80 clocked at 3.25MHz, had 1K RAM, could display sixty four by fortyu eight pixels, and required an external tape player/recorder for any storage. Despite these limitations, Psion managed to develop a flight simulator that modelled the basic bits of flying a twin engined propellor plane. The game displayed an instrument panel and windowed horizon. For all of its impressive feats given the hardware it had to work with, it did have a pretty funny mistake; in FLIGHT Simulation, there are three hundred sixty one degrees in a circle.
Another extremely impressive title was Chess. Most software for the ZX81 required the 16K RAM pack, but Psion released a 1K version of Chess (though there was a much more playable 16K version too). The company released a few dual sided tapes. For example, their Fantasy Games tape contained Perilous Swamp on side A, and Sorcerer’s Island on side B. Both of these were text adventures. Beyond games, the company did release Vu-Calc, and Vu-File productivity titles.
The ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum were successful enough that writing software for these machines was commercially successful. To fascilitate their software development efforts, Psion purchased a VAX minicomputer running VMS (was most likely a VAX 11/780). Having developed and released Vu-Calc and Vu-File, the company was working to develop a productivity suite. This suite was comprised of Abacus, Archive, Easel, and Quill. Abacus was a spreadsheet, Archive was a flat-file database, Easel was a charting tool, and Quill was a word processor. These were developed on the VAX for the Sinclair QL which was released on the 12th of January in 1984.
Potter and several other folks from Psion were sharing some pints at a greek place in London and discussing the lack of portability in computing. They were also quite frustrated that any loss in power would result in the loss of one’s working data. Perhaps the booze, perhaps the right combination of people in the right setting, or more likely the right amount of alochol with the right people in the right setting… a sketch was made on a napkin of a device to solve the problems. In June of 1984, Psion released the Organiser. This was a handheld, eight bit microcomputer based around the HD3601X (a Hitachi manufactured, CMOS, Motorola 6800) clocked at 900kHz with 2K SRAM and 4K ROM (the RAM, ROM, and CPU were all a single chip, and that 2K RAM is all that the CPU could directly address). The machine had a sixteen character, single line, liquid crystal display. Unlike other hand held computers of its day, the Organiser had mass storage available in the form of Datapaks which were essentially EPROMs of either 8K or 16K, and it could hold two Datapaks at once. Datapaks were write-once media until taken to service center where they could be erased with UV. These were seen by the system as serial devices, and therefore complicated and slowed data access. Specifically, were a program to require data at position two hundred, for example, the program would likely set the read position to zero and then step forward two hundred times. Given the speed of the EPROMs, this wasn’t too bad for the time period, but it was slower than it could have been using something other than a serial bus. An entire 16K Datapak could be searched in five seconds with most operations being far shorter.
There were some extremely clever tricks played with this device to get around some technological limitations of the time period. The HD6301X added power management and sleep states to the 6800. These were leveraged extensively. With no active process being run but the device switched on, the CPU clock would be frozen. A deeper sleep mode could then be enabled which would turn off the display. Yet, this machine did not have a proper real-time clock… it faked it. Given the extreme power efficiency it otherwise had, the Organiser had a counter and specific RAM location for time. Every seventeen minutes and four seconds, the device would add one thousand twenty four seconds to that memory thereby updating the time. This also meant that even its deepest sleep state, the machine would wake briefly to update the time. When the device was fully active, the time/date appeared to be handled by an RTC, but it was still just incrementing seconds. Regarding those sleep states and the like, the device was powered by a single 9V alkaline cell yielding around six months of normal use.
This computer didn’t really have an operating system. Given the 4K ROM, there really wasn’t enough room to have anything too sophisticated. At power-on, the device will display the clock/calendar, and the user can press the mode key to clear the display. As for programs, the Organiser shipped with the already mentioned clock/calendar, a calculator, and a flat file database. The database had dedicated keys just for it which minimized the amount of typing that would need to be done by the user. Records in the dattabase were up to two hundred characters long. So, the user would hit the mode key until the enter mode came up, and then type in a record. Hitting save then obviously commits the data to a Datapak. Hitting the Find key allows a user to search for a given record with partial matching supported. For this tiny display, some allowances were made. For example, once scrolling left or right is started, the device will continue to scroll until another key is hit. Delete will always delete to the right unless there is nothing to the right, and then it will delete to the left. The calculator wasn’t exactly feature rich. It was a simple four function calculator, but it did support floating point.
Yet, this was a real computer. The Organiser had the POPL programming language available for it via an application pack (takes one of the Datapak slots). The language was simple and limited with any given procedure being limited to two hundred characters total, lines being limited to one hundred characters total, and RAM available for data being limited to three hundred fifty six bytes total. Of course, other applications were offered for the device, but they all were rather simple given the device’s limitations. For some more interesting usage, remember that the Datapak slots were essentially ports. A Datapak-format communications interface and program was available as the Communications pack allowing connection to another computer or to a modem with the ability to set baud rate, parity, and so on. Things like finance programs, slightly more complicated math, physics, and so on were all available.
As cool as the organizer was, it was extremely limited in pretty much every way. Psion had got many things right in the first go, as reviewers were quick to admit, and that made iterating on the design somewhat easy. The Organiser II CM released in 1986 was built on the Hitachi HD6303X (Motorola 6803) clocked at 920kHz with 8K RAM and 32K ROM. The screen was a much improved dot matrix LCD with two lines of sixteen characters. This version also shipped with a little piezo beeper built in, and an expansion slot on the top. The expansion slot could allow for a wired power adapter, a serial cable, a bar code reader, a telephone dialer, and even a USB port. Given the reputation of the first model for ruggedness and the coverage of the same quality in the second model, this particular model sold quite well to companies who needed handheld computers for inventory and other purposes. The Organizer II XP launched the same year, and this model had 32K RAM while otherwise being the same machine. Given that both of these models had significantly more RAM than their predecessor, the programming capabilities were greatly enhanced with a new language, OPL, which was similar to BASIC.
With the success of the Organizer II in 1986, Psion launched a slightly more updated version in 1988, the Psion Organizer II LZ. This model had 64K RAM and a 64K ROM with OPL built-in, and some more advanced features for the database. The calculator functions were also expanded. The display of the LZ was also better; it was still a dot matrix LCD with one bit per pixel, but now it had four lines with twenty characters per line (as opposed to sixteen) and a character set of two hundred thirty two characters (all previous models had a character set of two hundred characters). By 1988, Datapaks of larger sizes were available for the Organizer line. I am not certain when each new size came out, or perhaps they were all released around the same time? Either way, Datapaks of 32K, 64K, and 128K all made their way to market.
On the 26th of September in 1989, Psion released the MC200, MC400, and MC600. These were essentially notebook computers that were roughly the size of an A4 sheet of paper, though noticably thicker, and weighing in at a little over four pounds.
These machines made use of the Intel 80C86 with a 256K ROM powered by either eight AA batteries or two NiCad battery packs. Of course, there was also a 12V mains adapter of the wall wart variety available. The machines could concurrently make use of up to four hot-swappable solid state disks, either writable or ROM. All three models also included a touchpad for pointer control. Oddly, this touchpad operated more similarly to graphics tablet where the location tapped on the pad is where the pointer would move (more or less) on the screen. These machines also featured a voice processor that allowed users to record and playback notes, or leave dictation for a typist. The voice chip apparently allowed for rather efficient compression of speech with eight minutes of voice being stored in just 64K of either central or secondary memory. Naturally, this meant that all three models featured both a speaker and microphone. They all additionally featured serial ports allowing connection to a PC, modem, or other device. For connection to a PC, Psion also offered PsiWin software. Which would synchronize data between the Psion applications and PC applications.
The specifications varied for RAM and display. The MC200 featured 128K RAM and a display resolution of six hundred forty by two hundred pixels, the MC400 had 640K RAM and a display resolution of six hundred forty by four hundred pixels, and the MC600 was capable of grayscale CGA and had 768K RAM. With those differences, battery life was quoted as seventy five hours, sixty hours, and thirty hours respectively.
The MC200 and MC400 ran an operating system called EPOC. This system was written in C and 8086 assembly language, was single-user, fully preemptively multitasked, and designed to run in ROM. This system was also fully graphical, and it had an OPL interpreter. Interestingly, EPOC would pre-load the built-in applications to make things a bit quicker.
The MC600 was quite different and ran MS-DOS 3 from ROM. This allowed the use of things like Lotus 1-2-3, WordStar, and dBase and could be purchased with up to 1MB of RAM and further expanded to 3MB of RAM. This also meant that the MC600 wasn’t really a sixteen bit organizer like the other two, but more a super power efficient PC-compatible laptop that happened to have some organizer style software on it. The MC600, despite its differences, also still supported PsiWin.
Unfortunately, these machines were extremely expensive. The MC400 cost around $1268 at launch which would be roughly $3206 in 2024. The MC600 was about double that price. Adding to this, the software wasn’t truly ready at launch with many promised features not appearing until software updates were released the following year. The cost and incomplete feature set hurt sales and almost took the company out of business.
The company wasn’t idle despite their struggles. The company was working on EPOC software while also continuing hardware development. The next computer models were the HC 100, 110, and 120 shipping with EPOC in 1991. These three handheld models that would serve in industrial use cases, warehouses, and stores. Similar to the original Organiser series, these had the connector on top for various attachments.
These machines were built around an 8086 clocked at 3.84 MHz paired with a 256K ROM, 256K to 1MB of SRAM, and optional flash storage modules and other expansions. This line also had an optional docking cradle for charging and data transfer.
Psion had a great OS, great hardware, and a good vision. What it really needed was a the right combination of hardware features and pricing to get a successful consumer product. The handheld computers did well in segments requiring the form factor, but the laptop style computers did poorly. Psion decided to attempt merging the two to make one of the first palm top computers. In September of 1991, Psion released the Series 3. The Psion Series 3 was built around an NEC V30 CPU clocked at 4.7MHz, with 128K or 256K RAM, two SSD slots, a screen of two hundred forty by eighty pixels measuring three and eight tenths by one and a half inches, and used just two AA batteries yielding an eighty hour run time. The device even had an optional modem with a terminal and eMail client.
The Series 3 was roughly a third the cost of the MC400, and EPOC’s teething issues were solved. Psion’s word processor, PIM suite, OPL, and C SDK had all been significantly improved. OPL even had full native graphics support allowing enthusiasts, hobbyists, and professionals to develop applications that felt native on the platform. The original Series 3 was followed by the 3a in 1993 which had a larger screen and higher screen resolution of four hundred eighty by one hundred sixty pixels capable of displaying grays as opposed to just black or white. The CPU was upgraded to an NEC V30H running at 7.68 MHz, up to 2MB of RAM
Naturally, Psion took the technology from the Series 3a and adapted it to a handheld device which hit the market in 1995 as the Psion Workabout.
The Psion Series 3c was released in 1996 adding an IrDA port. This was followed by the Series 3mx in 1998. The 3mx brought with it an NEC V30MX clocked at 27.684 MHz, upped the minimum RAM to 1MB, and increased the serial connector’s speed. To ensure compatibility with earlier software, the clock speed could be reduced by pressing ctl + capslock. The 3mx was the final 16 bit organiser (SIBO) released by Psion. With the original and all of the variants, these SIBO devices sold roughly one and a half million units. The relatively high sales volume coupled with the improvements to software development tools led to more than fifteen hundred third party software titles being developed for the platform. This was a huge milestone in mobile computing software.
Starting in November of 1994, perhaps fearing the Apple Newton which released in August of 1993, Colly Myers at Psion began working on a 32 bit version of EPOC written primarily in C++ for ARM CPUs. With two other software engineers helping complete it, the kernel of this operating system was first successfully booted in the summer of 1995. This was a single-user, fully pre-emptive multitasking operating system with memory protection. Unlike the 16 bit version of EPOC, this system was available for other manufacturers to license for their own hardware. This new version of EPOC debuted on the 16th of June in 1997 with the Psion Series 5 while the first licensed product, the Geofox One, launched a little later in October. The Series 5 was built around a Cirrus Logic PS7110 CPU operating at 18.432 MHz. For a comparison of performance, think of an Intel 80486 clocked at 33 MHz. Of course, this wasn’t x86 but rather ARM7, and it only drew 20mA with a standy mode utilizing just 3 µA. The PS7110 was capable of addressing 1GB of RAM, but I do not believe any system ever used that. The Series 5 had a ROM of 6MB, RAM of 4MB or 8MB, an RS232 port, an IrDA port, a microphone, an internal speaker, a compact flash slot, touchscreen LCD of six hundred forty by two hundred forty pixels capable of sixteen color gray scale, and a keyboard that had real keys. All of this was powered by two AA batteries with a runtime of ten to twenty hours.
The Geofox One utilized the same CPU, an 8MB ROM, 16MB of RAM, a bad keyboard, a larger screen with a resolution of six hundred forty by three hundred twenty pixels, and still ran on just two AA batteries. This machine also utilized a touchpad rather than a touch screen, and included a PCMCIA card slot and a modem for that slot.
The modem was a Psion Dacom Gold card modem capable of 33.6 kbps. Anyone using the modem, however, would want to use mains power as the device would otherwise devour batteries the way yours truly devours a low country boil. Another major difference is that the Geofox shipped with EnRoute which was an early navigation program. When combined with a PCMCIA card GPS receiver, the Geofox One became a competent competitor to a Garmin. Of the two, the Series 5 did well and the Geofox One did not. Geofox sold around a thousand units and the company went out of business.
The 16 bit hardware and software had been created by small teams. The 32 bit hardware and software saw the company grow to well over a hundred engineers most of whom were in their twenties or thirties. They were young enough to be enthusiastically creative and this shows in some choices in EPOC32. No user ever really had to worry about selecting a specific place to save things, dialog boxes were flat and navigated by the arrow keys, and simple English language was used throughout the entire system. Being object oriented, some rather sophisticated stuff was possible. For example, a user could draw a stethoscope into Agenda to represent a doctor’s meeting. Most applications were drag-and-drop aware as well. This meant that a user could drag and drop a to-do list onto the Agenda’s day view with a set time. Thanks to EPOC32 these new ARM-based machines could serve as the netbooks of their era offering web browsers, email clients, and instant messengers. Rather quickly the software market began to expand, and within just a year or two of launch, EPOC32 had things like ZX Spectrum emulators available for it.
Despite how well thought out both the hardware and software were, a competitor had sprung from the soil of the USA, Palm. Early in Palm’s life, they’d actually tried to get acquired by Psion, but Psion had little interest. The Palm Pilot appeared to be little more than an electric day planner while Psion was making handheld computers. Unfortunately, the USA had quickly become the land of the PC. An inexpensive companion device whose data would easily sync with a PC running Windows 95 and Outlook 97 was extremely attractive to people in the US, and the Palm Pilot was the fastest selling computer product in history in 1997. As for competing with computers more generally and not just the handheld space, PC compatibles were conquering the Earth and Psion’s own data synchronization capabilities didn’t seem to count for much when trying to fight Palm. Then… this was also becoming the time of mobile phones, and those phones were swiftly gaining handheld computing capabilities. Over the years, Psion had compartmentalized as it grew. The company had Psion Computers working on the palm top devices, Psion Enterprise working on the handheld machines, and Psion Software working on EPOC. A decision was made to spin out Psion Software as its own company, and one hundred thirty Psion employees found themselves working for a newly formed Symbian Ltd on the 24th of June in 1998. This new company was a joint venture from Psion, Nokia, Motorola, and Ericsson with each receiving about a quarter of the ownership. Goldman Sachs estimated that the company was worth around $150 million. Colly Myers was put in place as the CEO, Potter as Chairman, and the rest of the operational leadership was comprised of former Psion folks. Naturally, aside from Potter, the rest of the ownership of the company consisted of folks from Nokia, Motorola, and Ericsson. So, the owners of the company were also customers of the company.
The first mission of Symbian was to get as many licensees as possible to prevent them from signing with Microsoft. This was a conscious move on the part of the Symbian leadership, and perhaps not without reason. Symbian did get quite a few licensees, and this was partially due to pricing. The company asked just £5 for each smartphone. This pricing model was the only pricing model regardless of the size of the licensee.
Psion followed the Series 5 with the 5mx in June of 1999. The 5mx used an ARM710T clocked at 36 MHz, a 10MB ROM, and 16MB of RAM. Otherwise, it was largely the same as the Series 5 that preceded it. In time for the launch, the company had significantly improved its application suite with Contacts, Word, Sheet, Email and so on being able to synchronize with Outlook, Lotus Organizer, Microsoft Schedule Plus, Lotus cc:mail, and Exchange via PsiWin. The PsiWin synchronization software also allowed users to perform full backups of their Psion EPOC32 device, or drag and drop files back and forth while viewing the Psion as an external hard disk. For those users of Outlook Express or other unsupported applications, there was an ecosystem of add-on software to support the synchronization of data with more PC applications.
In late November of 1999, the company released a successor to to the Series 5mx, the Revo. This machine was a slimmed down and lighter version of the 5mx with slightly smaller screen, no compact flash slot, and no voice stuff. The keyboard had a new design, and it was well received, but the screen, lack of expansion, and lack of voice features hurt the device’s reception. This device’s reveal took place at a Psion press event in London and the company had brought in Stephen Fry as the compere. To his dismay, no effort had been put into Apple Macintosh support for the device either… and that was Fry’s first question to the Psion reps present. I imagine the mood of the event was significantly dampened with that opening.
The Psion netBook launched in late 1999 aimed at the mobile enterprise market. The device had a partially leather outer shell, a much larger screen, and many of the features found in the Series 5. This time, however, Psion used the Intel SA-1100 StrongARM CPU clocked at 190MHz, up to 64MB of DRAM, a lithium-ion battery, and supported both Compact Flash or IBM MicroDrive. The screen was now a seven and seven tenths inches, color, touch-sensitive, LCD with a resolution of six hundred forty by four hundred eighty pixels. Both the speaker and microphone returned in this model.
The Revo was intended to be the lower cost, lighter, consumer-oriented Psion product, and the Series 7 launched in early 2000 (though some units may have shipped in late 1999) as the higher-end device. The Series 7 was extremely similar to the netBook that preceded it for the enterprise space. The CPU was clocked lower at 132.71MHz, the RAM was cut in half, IBM MicroDrive support wasn’t available, and it was lighter. The Macintosh support was a little better than that of the Revo, but from what I understand, it was still far behind the support for Windows.
Given that the Revo was obviously not going to live up to the Series 3 or the Series 5, the company released the Revo Plus in September of 2000. This was much the same machine as the Revo but with 16MB of RAM instead of 8MB, and two embedded, rechargable, 700mAh NiMH batteries as opposed to conventional and removable alkalines. On the software side of things, the Revo Plus had support for SMS, and it included the Opera web browser by default. None of this addressed the issues present in the Revo, obviously, and many felt that the Series 5 or even Series 3 were the better options for the budget conscious.
In 2000, Psion acquired Teklogix to rejuvinate its enterprise lineup and attempt to get back to its own roots. Fairly swiftly, the Teklogix brand and products became Psion Teklogix. The devices that resulted from this acquisition were unique for Psion in that they were x86 and ran Windows.
On the 25th of June in 2001, Psion released its first Chinese-market device, the 618C, which was essentially a Chinese-localized Revo. That same year the netBook was re-released as the netBook Pro with a spec bump and Windows CE. The final, traditional, Psion machine was released on the 28th of September in 2001, the NetPad. This was something of a cross between Psion’s industrial handheld machines and the Psion netBook, and it was aimed at the industrial sector. It was built around the Intel’s StrongARM clocked at 206MHz. It had 16MB of ROM and 16MB SDRAM. It was powered by a 875mAh lithium-ion battery yielding about ten hours of operating time between charges, but a larger battery pack of 1400mAh was available. The device did have a cell for RAM data retention in the event of power loss, likely handy for people working in a warehouse and not near a charger. It’s display was six hundred forty by two hundred forty pixels with touch, and color. This time, however, the device could switch between landscape and portrait.
The netPad was designed to be extremely rugged and survive a five foot drop onto concrete. It lacked ethernet, bluetooth, USB, and the like, but it did have IrDA, RS232, an MMC/SD card slot, and optional WiFi or cellular connectivity. The first release of the Psion netPad used Symbian and packed many familiar applications to EPOC32 users like Word, Sheet, Time, Alarms, Calculator, Voice Recorder, Opera, and the like, but it also included Java. It was capable of instant messenging, fax, email (smtp, pop3, imap4), HTTP 1.1 (HTML 3.2, Java Applets, JS, SSL, GIF/JPG), and it still supported PsiWin with conversions of native document formats to those of MS Office or Lotus SmartSuite as well as synchronization with Outlook and Exchange. Later versions of the netPad switched to using Windows CE as did the later netBook Pro.
Back at Symbian, in 1998, Scott Jenson who’d worked on the original Newton’s design joined the new company. He, Juha Christensen and Nick Healey wanted to be certain that a variety of devices with different form factors and methods of interaction could make use of the operating system. To this end, they came up with six different device reference family designs (DFRDs) with names based on gemstones. These were emerald, sapphire, ruby, pearl, quartz, and crystal. This was then reduced to five, and then to three. Pearl was the single-hand device family, quartz was the stylus type device family, and crystal was the QWERTY keyboard device family. Each of these device types had its own graphical user interface, and its own assumptions about how users would interact with the UI. The quartz interface was initially designed and built at Ericsson’s design lab in Ronneby, Sweden. That lab was acquired by Symbian and the design came with it. The crystal design was built by Nokia, and it was never actually shared with anyone as far as I know. For anyone wishing to license it, he/she would have needed to approach Nokia, but there were some loose clones of that design, and it was… something of a hostile replacement of designs made by Symbian.
Symbian was very much not Psion, and for the employees, this became obvious within the first year. The Psion staff had been accustomed to running with radical designs, getting them to market, and working on the next thing immediately after. This didn’t happen at Symbian. Meetings were long, never seemed to reach conclusive decisions, and Ericsson and Nokia weren’t really quick to accept anything from Symbian. Nokia slowly began to flex its muscles to control the company as it quickly rose to be the largest mobile phone vendor on Earth. Within eight months of joining, Nick Healey left the company. Yet, for all of the other players in the market, Symbian operated as a consultancy where they could take a reference design and adapt it to a customer’s hardware and give it a unique look and feel. This became a decent revenue source for Symbian. Given that all of these custom designs were being made, the DFRDs eventually became redundant and were largely superseded. In November of 2001 at COMDEX, Nokia unveiled the Series 60 interface with the Nokia 7650, and it essentially killed the Pearl design.
This phone was a big deal. It was the first mass market Symbian OS device, the first phone from Nokia with camera (VGA resolution), the first Nokia phone with MMS, and it packed bluetooth and GPRS. It worked with both Java and EPOC applications, and it was released on the 26th of June in 2002. It was popular, sold really well, and made Symbian OS beat both Palm OS and Windows CE in the European market. This phone and its software largely set the standard feature set for early smartphones.
Psion Software and the early days of Symbian were filled with problem solvers who had backgrounds in natural sciences, mathematics, audio engineering, and related fields. The company didn’t much care whether or not the person had a degree, a background in computing, or even any familiarity with company and its products. They really just wanted the best people, and this led to a creative and vibrant company that focused on its products. The Nokia dominated Symbian was more similar to other megacorporations with which we are all somewhat familiar. It hired computer science graduates who lacked experience and were familiar with Symbian’s software. Management began to take more control and dissent wasn’t tolerated. Most of the folks who commented on the time period relate that the politics were annoying, meetings were somewhat hostile, innovation wasn’t encouraged, and that former Psion folks were leaving all the time. By 2002, Christensen had left for Microsoft, and Myers left that year to found IssueBits. Despite the tumult, Symbian picked up more licensees including Arima, Fujitsu, Sharp, and BenQ.
In September of 2003, Motorola sold its stake in Symbian to Psion and Nokia. This was followed by Psion’s exit in February of 2004. Psion’s stake was split among Nokia, Matsushita, Siemens, and Sony Ericsson with the deal being finalized in July of 2004. At that time, Nokia held 47.9% of the company.
By 2007, Symbian OS was powering about two thirds of the mobile market, and Nokia acquired it in 2008. Following the acquisition, Nokia setup a non-profit, the Symbian Foundation, to which it donated both its S60 platform and all of Symbian Ltd’s assets. The hope was that the Symbian Foundation would develop and open source operating system that could power the mobile space without royalties. This move was a bit late. The iPhone had launched, and Android had just been unveiled. Still, Symbian was still king, and it was adapted to compete. For example, Nokia released the 5800 XpressMusic in late 2008, and it had… a rather familiar UI.
Symbian lost its majority status in the last three months of 2010 to Android when 33.3 million Android devices were shipped. Around this time, the Symbian Foundation faultered. It became a licensing operation only with no permanent staff, and Nokia brought development of Symbian in-house. Nokia was losing its way, and they knew it. Nokia’s CEO, Steven Elop, said in a memo:
While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time, we thought we were making the right decisions; but, with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind.
[…]
We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.
Well, in 2011, Nokia handed over development of Symbian to Accenture, and they pivoted to Windows Phone 7, Psion was acquired by Motorola in 2012 for $200 million (though they’d been out of Symbian for quite some time), and the last Symbian device was made by Nokia in 2013, the 808 PureView.
This final device was built around an ARM11 CPU clocked at 1.3GHz and a Broadcom BCM2763 GPU that supported OpenGL ES 2.0. It had 512MB of RAM, 16GB of storage, an SD card slot, a four inch AMOLED display with a resolution of six hundred forty by three hundred sixty pixels, and a 41MP camera sensor capable of 30fps 1080p video recording. It’s front camera was a less impressive 0.3MP with 480p 30fps video. It featured an accelerometer, electronic compass, a proximity sensor, Bluetooth 3, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, FM radio, USB2, micro HDMI, and NFC.
Both Psion and Symbian held extremely good market positions for a time, and it seems as though both got a bit too comfortable in their dominance. This is not a unique fate, but it is always sad to see. In the course of research and writing, I always start to cheer for the successes of the people involved, and I became, ephemerally, a fan of the company under scrutiny. This happened here too. Thank you to Psion, Symbian, and all of the folks who constituted those organizations. You innovated and pushed the state of the art forward, and I hope you’re never forgotten.
I have readers from many of the companies whose history I cover, and many of you were present for time periods I cover. A few of you are mentioned by name in my articles. All corrections to the record are welcome; feel free to leave a comment.