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Once upon a time Psion was a company that made clamshell computers with keyboards. These were much loved by businesses and consumers. They ranged in dimensions from the kind of machine you could fit into a top pocket (the Revo) to something about half the size of an ‘average’ notebook (the Series 7). Then Psion pulled out of the consumer market, the Series 7 was reinvented as a corporate machine called the NetBook, and Psion spun off Symbian to develop its proprietary operating system for smartphones and other ‘connected devices’. Psion joined forces with Canadian company Teklogix to become Psion Teklogix, and its focus on the corporate area span out into domains like sales force automation, field service management and field inspection. That’s where the new NetBook Pro is targeted.

It’s quite important to take this history lesson at the start of a review of the NetBook Pro because it is a computer that will grab many readers’ eyes as the ideal portable machine. Small and light, with long battery life and a perfectly adequate word processor provided out of the box, it is the kind of computer many ‘word workers’ would consider a dream machine. But not Psion Teklogix; it doesn’t want to sell to individuals or to companies wanting computers to deploy to professionals outside the areas already noted.

I think this is a pity, and I think you’ll agree when you see what the NetBook Pro has to offer.

The NetBook Pro is a very ergonomic machine to use. Its keyboard is small – the chassis is only 234mm wide, the keyboard slightly less, but it is perfectly large enough for touch typing, and the keys have a very responsive feel to them. The screen is touch sensitive, and I can’t emphasise enough what a boon this is. How nice to be able to start applications with a tap on their icons rather than using the conventional notebook method of fiddling with a touchpad or having to carry a mouse around.

There’s 128MB of RAM on board for your data. This is nowhere near as much as a conventional notebook, admittedly, but it is enough for a few presentations and works in progress. And there are slots for PC Card, Compact Flash and SD/MMC cards if you need more data storage. Indeed flash memory cards are the ideal places to keep data as if the main battery depletes fully, the twin AAA backup batteries will retain data stored in the RAM for a certain period, but when they deplete all the RAM based data is lost. An alternative is to copy crucial data to a 12MB portion of the ROM reserved for this purpose. The SD card slot, incidentally, supports SDIO, which means it can be used for hardware add-ons.

Fans of older Psion machines will perhaps bemoan the fact that the operating system and base provided software are built on Microsoft Windows CE.NET 4.2 rather than Psion’s old EPOC operating system. In fact this is something of a plus point for corporate users, for whom application development and integration with Microsoft driven back office systems should be far easier than it would be using the long time stagnant EPOC.

Psion Teklogix reckons any applications written for Windows Mobile 2003 (which runs on newer Pocket PCs and which is also built on CE.NET 4.2) should function on the NetBook Pro, though they may not be optimised for the 800 x 600 pixel display on this machine. And if you can’t get what you want via the CE.NET avenue, there is always the JEM-CE version of Java, which is also built-in.

The operating system shift has made it easy for Psion Telkogix to offer user specified upgrades like Ethernet, Bluetooth, 802.11, GSM/GPRS and even CDMA. These can be built as required, though none is in the device as it ships. What you get out of the box in this department is a USB connector and infra red.

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