Psion, once the ruler of all things PDA in what is now known as the EU, stepped away from the game after sales of the mobile devices started slipping as convergence devices began swamping the market. Psion produced PDAs of the clamshell variety, a form-factor which didn’t favor mobile phone conversions. They instead laid all their cards on the mobile phone OS project they started, Symbian. You may have heard of it. You may have also heard that Psion didn’t do so well with it and ended up selling all of their shares (as did the other partners in the co-op) to Nokia.

Before Psion gave up the ghost on PDAs, though, they produced the consumer-oriented Revo and the enterprise-oriented Netbook/Netbook Pro products. The Netbook, and the Series 7 device before it, were powered by the EPOC operating system while the Netbook Pro was powered by Microsoft’s Windows CE 5.0 OS. Psion cancelled the consumer lines, however, and only continued the Netbook Pro with WinCE installed for their corporate customers, a product they would cancel a few years later.

Psion, however, seems to be kinda pist about everyone’s usage of the term Netbook as if it were some generic designation akin to the way people talk about Q-tips or Vaseline, both trademarked product names. As far as I know, however, there are no other products which are using the Netbook name and the term is only being used to as a descriptive. Its a mystery, then, why Psion’s legal department is sending news and blogger sites Cease & Desist letters. Its not like they can sue the sites for use of the term. If any judge allowed such a case to be won, no news site could ever specifically refer to a product again without getting sued.

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