Haha that's wild that you mention Psion because I already have a bunch of images/writing regarding them. Palm as well, but Psion is a lot more niche at least in the USA. Do you know which models you had?
The Psion 3 used an OS called EPOC/16, and the 32bit version became Symbian OS.
I never had a PDA device, and I was really late to adopt even a cell phone.
My father had an iPhone years before I got mine.
A big thing for me early on was the iPod though. It was a big deal to carry around 40 gigs of music, and I couldn't live without that thing.
Flock may not operate in the UK, but I can bet there is a counterpart with similar technology. I know you guys have the CCTV system so there could be some differences involved there as well. Leonardo's ELSAG system I believe is based in Italy.
All of our police here have cars with laptops mounted in them, and with Flock when they come up and ask you "where you coming from, where you going?" they could theoretically already know the answers.
The company itself also operates in very secretive ways such as registering it's business locations as other companies.
There are town halls where they vote against adopting Flock, and the city just does it anyway. It's the first time I've seen people actually react to the surveillance-state.
I had the Psion 3 that I got second hand. It has some nice apps, but no connectivity. I wrote some simple programs on it. It is long gone, but I still have my Palms. Not used them recently. My dad had a Psion 5 that was like a mini laptop. I also knew someone who had the Atari Portfolio handheld. Fun times.
That's wild that you mention the Portfolio because I was just yesterday trying to remember what John Conner was using to hack the ATM in Terminator 2.
I'm fairly sure it was one of those.
Apparently the Psion 3 was also released as the Acorn Pocketbook, and that's another very important British computer company. They actually became ARM which is used in basically every modern phone/tablet.
The wiki shows the Psion 3 had a travel-modem that would give it connectivity, but in 1991 I'm pretty sure most people's experience of the internet was just BBS, Usenet, and maybe email servers? People were probably playing all-text MUDs back then too I think.
What did you use your Palm devices for? Was it also like your phone?
Even though I was late to getting a cell phone; a bunch of my friends had T-Mobile Sidekick's also marketed as Danger Hiptops.
They were the first phone that was more like a computer, and what really caught my attention was they had AOL Instant Messenger which we all used back then on our computers.
They also had "real" web browsers that worked, and they were designed to be used in landscape rather than portrait.
The founder of Danger Inc. later created Android, and the Sidekick's also made heavy use of Java.
Back then we talked about Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) so they have you a calendar, address book and other functions of a Filofax that was also a big thing then. You could also play games. I'm sure some business people used modems for various stuff, but I didn't have one. You could exchange data via infrared on the Palm. With the Palm Zire I got a basic camera and could play music from an SD card.
My first real smartphone was an HTC Tattoo. Actually I had a Windows one before that, but it was very basic.
The infrared thing sounds pretty cool.
I remember ring-tones were a big deal, and on my LG enV2 there was a sort of app store with terrible apps. But the main thing on there were wallpapers and ringtones. We used to even make our own.
My first smartphone was the iPhone 4. I still have it, and it's so tiny. Like the size of a credit-card. I got it for one dollar because Apple would do that with their oldest phones to move the inventory and get people hooked I guess.
My next phone was a Sony Xperia Z3V XL. I wanted the smaller version, but only the XL was on Verizon. People made fun of me for having such a huge phone, but within a year or so everyone had big phones.
Android was everything I wanted my iPhone to be. I could transfer files from my computer to my phone, and that included my music.
With iPhone you could only move files through iTunes, and it "de-activated" a ton of my songs because I guess they were originally purchased through iTunes but I had gotten them via p2p/torrents. Today though there are iPhone features that I wouldn't mind having over Android.
I never got much into Apple stuff and I found iTunes annoying when I had to use it. I've had various Android devices, but I don't go for the top end models. That gets expensive if you upgrade every few years.
Aside from the Sony, I've had Google Pixel phones which are pricey but you pay for them each month for 2 years or something. The main thing I worry about with the phone is the camera, and Pixels usually have a good camera.