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Psion Revo Plus

36 MHz EPOC release 5 palmtop

See also:

Status

Broken

Specifications

Power packed into a little box

The real source of my pride in this machine is the level of sophistication achieved with the operating system. The following list is an incomplete summary of the capabilities of the machine:

All of the above (and plenty more unlisted features), fits into a single file-system-mapped MB ROM, and the MB RAM is shared between the kernel, running processes and the RAM drive. Having the distinct pleasure to own this device is what taught me that it is not necessary to involve the bloat we see today to achieve a worthy computer system. (That, and that closing unused programs is not necessary!)

Window shadows in EIKON

As pretty as window shadows in Mac OS X may look, there is something still somewhat fake about them: despite achieving Photoshop-style drop shadows in a GUI, the shadow depth itself has no bearing on the relative heights of windows on the screen, and shadows appear cast onto some invisible surface sitting just below each window. The real achievement of window shadows in EIKON (the standard EPOC GUI), is that the shadow depth at any point is based on how high the window casting the shadow is above the window on which the shadow is being cast. As EPOC normally runs in 2-bit greyscale, the darkness of the shadow does not vary, but the effect is rather attractive even so:

The only thing that would make it more impressive would be bump-mapped controls!