Revo: You'll fall in love with it!. Review on Psion Revo

''He is married to his organiser'' I think this comment of My ex-Boss reg my Psion Revo sums up my adoration, admiration, adulation etc. etc. for my Revo.

And there are a bunch of Solid reasons for it.

Let's start with the hardware.

The screen

The screen of Psion Revo is one thing that still keeps me interested in Revo, despite all those keyboardless PDA beauties in the market. Specially it is very handy when you have to see a word document or a spreadsheet. There is handy zoom facility to adjust the text/display size. The screen is touch sensitive and is precise - you can create quite reasonable sketches with the stylus provided. Of course it is B/W. The resolution and contrast are excellent.

Stylus

Quite handy input devise, though most of the time I don't use it - I freak out on the keyboard. Fits snugly in the rear of the unit.

Keyboard

Is an absolute beauty - look wise as well as function wise. It slides out of the unit on opening in a classic way. The keys are big enough for typing with both the hand. It's a wonder how they managed to put the keys in such a small space. The touch of the key is good, you feel that you are using a laptop.

Memory

8 MB

Sufficient for most of the use, specially since you can temporarily shift files to PC in case you need some extra space - Sometimes I had reset the PC to zero level with all the 8 MB available for transferring files from my Home PC to Office PC! And after the transfer is done, restore all my old files with a click!

Speaker

The unit has a very basic speaker, which is mainly used for alarms, however, it can play WAV files also.

Battery

It has a rechargable battery which is remarkable given the screen size it has to handle. It requires a small charge of one to two hours daily to run like a horse. It is one very useful feature as it prevents you from piling up large amount of batteries and polluting mother Earth.

Now, the SOFT and the most interesting and powerful side of it.

OS

The machine works on Epoch OS.

Connectivity

The Revo comes with an excellent connectivity software PsiWin. After installing, your Revo opens as another folder in My Computer of your PC. And you can drag and drop file from PC to Revo and vice-versa. Conversion between Revo formats and WIn formats are done on the fly in a absolutely flawless manner. So you can have your budget xls on the computer, convert it to Psion format while copying it to Revo, edit it on the move, convert it back again to xls on PC when you get back home - with all the formatting etc intact!

Applications

Revo has all the applications you can dream of - including a OPL programming language - if you want to really tune up your programming skills on a long train journey! Including an OPL manual! List of apps consists of WORD, SPREADSHEET, DATABASE, WEB BROWSER, EMAIL CLIENT, SKETCH, GAMES, ORGANISER, CONTACTS, PHONEBOOK, CALCULATOR etc, etc, If you are enterprising, there are lots of sites with good software for Revo - maybe not as many as Palm sites, but enough to satisfy 99.999% of all your needs.

And now the SAD part. Psion has discontinued its PDA range - so REVO will no longer will be available in the market after some time. I'm really heart-broken - I'm planning to get another one and hoard it to use after my current one says sayonara. It's been with me since March'2000, when I picked it up at CDG, Paris.