Flight Planner Enhances Psion Series 3
BOSTON — April 4, 1994 — Psion Inc., U.S. subsidiary of British portable computer group Psion Plc., announced today the addition of a North American flight timetable to enhance its award-winning Series 3 palm-top computers.
Since the successful introduction of the Series 3a in Septeber 1993 Psion has assumed the dominant position in the market for Personal Digital Assistants (PDA's) worldwide and has benefitted from the failure of pen-based PDA's, such as the Apple Newton and Casio Zoomer, to establish retail markets. Psion has recently increased its production of Series 3 machines to 24,000 per month.
The flight program, 3 Flight Manager, is one of several product enhancements that Psion is planning in the first half of 1994. It includes flight details of all scheduled domestic flights in North America from every major airline in the region. It covers over 3 million individual departures from nearly 500 airports, and includes comprehensive transfer flight options. Aircraft type, turnaround times, flight durations and validity periods are all instantly available, with options to transfer chosen itineraries to the Series 3a Agenda, regarded by many as the most advanced time management system currently on the market.
Psion will sell the program initially on its 512K Flash Solid State Disks (SSD's) which reside in one of the machine's two expansion slots. It carries a $50 premium over the suggested retail price of $200 for the SSD alone. Pioneered by Psion in conjunction with Intel Corp., Flash technology provides the most reliable and power-efficient memory media for portable computers. Psion will offer a quarterly upgrade of the flight timetable for an annual subscription of $99.
Psion Inc. President David Elder commented, "To have detailed flight information at their fingertips, with all the other functionality the Series 3a can provide, will be a massive boost for efficiency-minded business travellers. The Series 3 is also perfectly designed for updating this information easily and cheaply, saving a lot paper in the process."
The Psion Series 3 range is available in over 1000 retail outlets in the U.S.A. and Canada, including Sears, Circuit City, the Sharper Image and CompUSA.
CONTACT:
Psion Inc.
David Elder, 508/371-0310