It all started with the Psion palmtop, resplendent with a useable QWERTY keyboard. This evolved into the Series 5, but over the water in the USA, Palm were breaking new (and to be honest) different ground with their stylus-driven PalmPilots. The latter became the accepted 'mainstream' face of PDAs for almost ten years, but keyboard fans have always had something to meet their needs, in the shape of the Psion Revo and then Nokia 9210, and finally the Nokia 9500 and 9300. Now, almost a decade after Palm got going, PDAs are acquiring keyboards again, as evidenced in the likes of the T-Mobile MDA pro and its clones.
It's rather ironic really. It's true that the latest generation of Windows Mobile devices have cutting-edge goodies, such as 3G and megapixel cameras. But the feature they shout most about, the inclusion of (shock horror) a proper keyboard, has been there all the time if only the media had stopped at looked over in the Symbian world. Although nothing will ever top the mechanical marvel that was the Psion Series 5 keyboard, with its full travel keys, the Nokia 9500 has come within striking distance in many ways, especially when you consider that it has a smaller, slimmer form factor.
Psion owners (and afterwards, Communicator owners) have long said that ease of text input is absolutely paramount in a mobile device for anything serious like messaging, email and Office file editing. It seems the rest of the world has finally come round to the same conclusion. In the last six months we've seen the T-Mobile MDA III (and clones branded by other network providers), with its full length slide-out keyboard, and the MDA Pro (and clones), with a twisting clamshell design revealing a QWERTY keyboard that takes up the full base of the device. Neither of these designs look anything as robust as the simple clamshell in the Nokia 9500, but at least they provide proper keyboard-based computing for those forced to stay in the Windows Mobile world.
Hopefully, the increased competition in this area will spur Nokia to develop their 9300 'smartphone' and 9500 'Communicator' further, to add 3G communications, a really good camera, better round-trip Office support, a faster processor, and so forth. According to my own Grid, the 9500 is still top dog for mobile computing today, but the rest of the field is catching up in a hurry.
