Information Appliances and Beyond: Interaction Design for Consumer Products
As technology moves off the desktop and into our everyday lives, designers face tough challenges in creating practical user interfaces for pint-sized devices.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Information Appliances and Beyond: Interaction Design for Consumer Products
Chapter 6: The EPOC User Interface in the Psion Series 5
NICK HEALEY
Slash Design Ltd.
6.1 Introduction
In July 1997 the British company Psion launched the Series 5 palmtop computer (see Figure 6.1; see also Color Plate). With a 640 x 420 grayscale screen, it included a word processor and spreadsheet, agenda (calendar) and address book, calculator, world time and alarms, voice memo, and programming language, all built in. Its keyboard and hinge mechanisms, for which patents have been applied, produced the first truly typable keyboard on a palmtop and the first "untippable" touchscreen.
Figure 6.1: Psion Series 5.
The community of Psion users has long displayed the sort of loyalty occasionally evangelical, that Apple has inspired with its products, and this has continued with the Series 5.
The Series 5 was based on a custom-written software "platform" (operating system plus applications) called EPOC (see Figure 6.2). This is now the product of a separate company, Symbian, which is jointly owned by Nokia,Motorola, Ericsson, Psion, and Matsushita (Panasonic). These companies have agreed to use EPOC in their products, developing its UL further, and to license it to other firms, making it the new global industry standard for new ranges of wireless information devices (WIDs), including smart phones, communicators, palm-sized machines, palmtops, and notebooks.
Figure 6.2: EPOC logo.
Symbian, the Symbian log, EPOC, and the EPOC logo are trademarks of Symbian Ltd. Psion, the Psion logo, Series 3, Series 3a, Series 3mx, Series 5, Series 5mx, and Revo are trademarks of Psion plc. All other trademarks are acknowledged.
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