Monday, December 10th, 2018

	On Sony PEG-UX50
	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Two weeks ago I  visited a local flea  market and  discovered two Palm
devices my humble collection was missing: Sony Clie PEG-UX50/E and IBM
WorkPad C3. I  bought both of them and as I have no  special  feelings
for IBM  devices, I put the  WorkPAd into the box with my other Palms,
the Clie is however quite a different story. 

Back when the UX50 was new on the  market, I was using  almost  decade
old  Psion  Series 3a and I  just  loved it. For me  there were  three
things  at  which  nobody  could  beat  Psion:   integrated  database,
programming in  OPL  and of  course   the  keyboard.  Even the  Series
3/a/c/mx, which had sort of  calculator-like chiclet keys, were better
than anything else in the price range. 

Then I  upgraded to Series 5mx, the best pocket handheld with a QWERTY
keyboard ever made, period. Very nice  keyboard, wide  touchscreen and
microkernel  operating system with full  multitasking. Windows CE were
laughable  even  five or six  years  later, with ten to  twenty  times
better  hardware. I could have twenty apps running at the same time in
16MB of  RAM  and on  33MHz CPU and  still  nothing was  killed in the
background and task switching was smooth. Plus there was a POSIX layer
addon  called emx with gcc, grep and all the other stuff I loved on my
desktop. And all this had no  problem  running 25  hours on pair of AA
2000mAh NiMH accumulators. 

After 5mx  there was only one  better  thing to get, Psion  Series 7 /
netBook. Color VGA  display, even  better  keyboard, PCMCIA slot, four
times  faster CPU. I did almost all my  college  courses just with the
netBook and was  using it  daily as late as  2012. But netBook  wasn't
exactly  pocketable, as it had  almost six by six inches and solid two
pounds. That was  exactly the time I  bought my first Palm  device - a
second hand Tungsten T. 

It  wasn't as  capable pocket device as my first two Psion  computers,
but it was more durable (it still works another eleven years later and
three lost  styluses later, still with the original battery) and quite
quickly I got the  graffiti thing so well, I could write blog posts on
it  while  commuting.  Tungsten T was  replaced  after two  years with
Tungsten T|X and that with Centro  smartphone. That's when I've got my
first Palm with a  hardware  QWERTY  keyboard built in and  changed my
perception of Palm PDAs as just companions to full computers. 

Then  modern  smartphones came and even  though I  tried badly (Xperia
Mini Pro,  Blackberry), the rest of the  world  decided, that it's not
necessary to have a hardware QWERTY keyboard and devices quite quickly
disappeared from the market. 

So  now I  have  another  one -  the  famous  UX50. It has  everything
Tungsten had and on the top of it, it has a  keyboard. I have to buy a
new  battery and an AC adapter and the WiFi doesn't exactly seem to be
working  correctly, but it  simply is a great  everyday carry  device.
This post was  typed on it and it's for sure not the last one, UX50 is
and will stay in my phlogflow. 

.