Motorola Solutions-- not the Motorola Mobility but the non-consumer part of the company-- buys Psion for $200 million in cash.
The Psion of today makes rugged and vehicle-mountable devices for enterprise use, but geeks of a certain age will remember Psion as a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) pioneer. Psion created the device category back in 1984 the Psion Organiser, predating the better known Palm Pilot by nearly 10 years.
In the 1980s the company developed EPOC, the precursor to the Symbian mobile OS.
Psion followed the Organiser with the Series 3 and 5 PDAs. The company owns the trademark for the word "netbook" (following the 1999 release of the Psion netBook), a handful interesting hinge/folding mechanism design patents and Canadian rugged wireless device maker Teklogix.
As we all know smartphones killed off the PDA category, and now it appears that Psion is definitely out of the consumer market. Now we only wonder what would have happened if the other Motorola-- the one Google owns-- bought Psion...
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