genjava / articles / psion netBook

Psion netBook

Essentials for a happy Psion netBook

IBM Gigadrive

This is a hap-hap-happy thing. 32 Meg seemed a lot, until I realised that large amounts of it were taken up by the OS. I got in the habit of reading books on the netBook, and the lack of space meant that I could only have one book at a time. The IBM drive was expensive, and scarily small. It is noticeably slow compared to the memory and EPOC's irritating file dialog's habit of showing the entire directory tree can get very tiring when you have a gigabyte's worth of directories. However, I'm now able to carry around a library of documentation, at a speed which matches anything but memory. I've not noticed any particular increase in power drain.

32 Meg DIMM

I'm not sure why I bought this. I clicked on it while buying the gigadrive. Once I got it, I felt that it was an expensive waste of money compared to the gigadrive, but it has proved to be a very good buy. While the gigadrive gives a large amount of storage space, I was still running fairly low on fast memory. With the large amounts of data that I was moving over in zipped form, the 30-40 free megs proved a very useful workspace.

FileSwitch

A nice little utility. It allows you to use ctrl-space to flip between running applications. The biggest keyboard lacking in the EPOC system. The next would be a keyboard way to bring up the Task Manager.

Opera

A pretty good improvement over the Symbian Web program. It comes with a few minor bugs, the largest being that Opera loses control over .html files from time to time and allows Web to regain it. To fix it, go to System\Apps\Opera, rename Opera.app to Opera.appX, wait a second, and then rename it back to Opera.app. This rehooks the control. Probably the largest dissapointment is that Opera is unable to uninstall Web, freeing up always needed space.

Editor

This is the Symbian editor which their own developers use. It's absolutley essential.

E-Shell

Need a command line? This is Symbian's own version. It's not perfect, but is a nice to have.

Perl

You can run perl on epoc. Not 100% convinced that its at a truly useable state though.

Python

Much like perl above, nice but unsure how useful it is.

RMRZip

Very useful, shareware so you'll have to fork out some cash to get the full usage. Unsure if it's really what's needed as all I really need is something to take a .zip file and output it to a given directory. RMRZip often hangs up and gets slow, however it's a processor and memory intensive set of operations, so it's hard to tell if it's RMRZip's fault or merely a severely overworked program.

JPE v0.9

Java Psion Editor. Pretty useful, it allows you to edit, compile and run java files. Check out the GenerationJava page on JPE.