Psion 5MX - a slice of 90's UK tech prowess - and still of use today!
The Psion series of 'PDFs' (Personal Digital Assistant) were the precursor of the Pilot and eventually, the iPhone, although much has changed since then. The team that built the Psion, a culmination of many year's exceptional engineering and software skill, found it's apogee in the 5MX. Able to do most things that were required of it back in those days such as spreadsheet, word processor, Agenda, Phone book, Email, memo recorder, even a very good alarm clock that allows you to record your own special alarms.
It was a fantastic piece of kit, and you could even surf the then-net with admittedly slow dial-up connection. This is pre-Wi-Fi, and the only connection with the outside world it has is an outdated serial port, IR, and an SD drive.
So why own one now, when almost everything is higher tech and whizzy and does so much more?
You can use it for what it was intended - the spreadsheet is powerful and the agenda very easy to use, even the address book. But they're almost impossible to share with anything else except another Psion.
And since so much of that is now available on a desktop, it might seem to be redundant, so I use mine really for one thing, of which it has no peer anywhere in the tech world, even today: The keyboard and the word package, plus batteries that will last for months. Pocket sized text input has never been so easy. If, like me, you want to punch out a letter, write something while standing in a queue or hate the annoying rattle of a train as you work, or the confined space of an airline seat, the Psion 5MX will allow you to do that, and once done, transfer to your PC using the SD card, which can store text as .TXT.
It's just so simple. There are a lot of third party software extras for it if you want to be geeky - even the ability to show eight-grey pictures or PDFs, but I love it for the keyboard and the portability. I bought my first one in 1995, and twenty one years later, still use it on an almost daily basis. I think I'm on about my seventh.
Verified purchase: YesCondition: Pre-owned