I started with a Psion 3 and later a Psion 5MX and now 30 years later I still remember how good the user experience was. The agenda, de contact database, the way you could make your own database with data that you wanted to lookup while on the move, it all just worked. At some point in time I even had a mapping tool, I think the precursor to what is now TomTom.
Personally I think that today an only iphone/macbook with just the default software (mail/contacts/calendar/etc) comes somewhat close to the same user experience. A Windows machine, while having a million different programs available at your fingertips, does not feel as a cohesive user experience.
That would have been Autoroute. Written in the UK, the software house, Nextbase, was bought by Microsoft in 1993/94 and the Psion release was called "Microsoft Automap" - the only Microsoft release for that platform!
And yet... I worked for a small software company (STNC Ltd.) that was acquired by Microsoft in '99. One of our customers was Psion, and then Symbian, we definitely shipped releases to them after the acquisition, so there was (or could be) Microsoft software on the Psion
On a different not, my understanding was that Psion had paid Cygnus to work on Arm support for gcc. So essentially Psion was responsible for gcc having arm support.
The tool chain was bizarre, writing c++ in the Microsoft Visual C++ ide, and building with gcc. Which was crazy in the 90s
Personally I think that today an only iphone/macbook with just the default software (mail/contacts/calendar/etc) comes somewhat close to the same user experience. A Windows machine, while having a million different programs available at your fingertips, does not feel as a cohesive user experience.