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While I'm at it, the rocker button duplicates the functions of the cursor keys and "OK" key. (Sometimes you hit Enter to select, sometimes "OK". They're different. Hit OK in the wrong place, it closes the app. Only the [X] in the corner doesn't really close the app, it just puts it into the background.)

But no, honest, it's Windows. If you know desktop Windows, you can work this. Yeah, right.

And with all this, the smartphone has about half the battery life of the Psion, with a big fat extended battery fitted.

I don't mind that it's a big, chunky device - I'm a big, chunky guy. I do mind it's too small to put many of its excellent features to good use, though.

So I'm back to square one - carrying 2 devices around. And an MP3 player, too, a phone memory card just isn't enough.

At least I can add new apps to the Universal and the Psion - and I have. I couldn't on the 7710, though, because it runs Series 90, making it incompatible with apps for Series 60 (the keypad-driven Symbian phones) or UIQ (the touchscreen-driven Symbian phones) and only barely intermittently compatible with Series 80 (the Nokia Communicators, with their smaller, non-touch-sensitive screens with hardware buttons and keyboards). Naturally, Symbian can't run Psion apps, either, just like Psion 5s couldn't run Psion 3 apps.

Symbian, like its ancestor Psion, does not get the point that an operating system needs to be a platform: something horizontally compatible as well as forwards and backwards, to make a open market worth exploiting. As my colleague Peter Fletcher once put it, it needs to learn the philosophy of kaizen, continuous improvement: that its new products must improve over its old ones in every way, with no retrograde steps.

Are the newer successors of the Psion 5mx or Nokia 6310i better in every way?

No.

A phone needs to be robust, tough and reliable. It is going to get dropped. It will get used in the rain. It will get taken to the pub and banged around. It needs to last for ages, be large enough to be usable but slim enough to fit into a trouser pocket inconspicuously. And it needs superlative voice and data comms, because that is its primary purpose. It must be fast and simple to use, not a morass of menus.

A PDA needs a better-than-VGA screen that can rival a laptop PC, a big keyboard that can you can type quickly upon, cheap and capacious storage - ideally solid-state - and basic multimedia. But it must be much smaller and cooler than the skinniest subnotebook and with a battery life to last a long weekend. It needs to do the main core functions of a laptop - office productivity, connectivity and a bit of fun - but without the bulk, the complexity or the power drain. It needs to be simple, fast and very reliable.

And these two devices need to talk, seamlessly, so that I can manage my address book on one but sync it to the other, so that in a crisis I can read my email on the phone and pick out a reply.

These are conflicting requirements. One device cannot do both well. Either can be simple on its own, but forcibly merge them and this simplicity is lost.

I want a Psion 5 with the specification of my HTC Universal: half-gigahertz ARM or better, a colour screen - the one from the Nokia 710 would do nicely - expandable with cheap standard MMC or SD cards but still able to take CompactFlash, sporting USB and Bluetooth and Wifi. It needs a headphone socket so I can use it as my MP3 player - the original had external play/record/pause buttons anyway, all I need is fast forward and rewind and a headphone socket and a volume knob. It only needs to fit into a jacket pocket, so that it can retain a screen that can render webmail clearly with no horizontal scrolling. It can live in a case most of the time, so if necessary, it can have a nifty tablet-style swivelling screen to keep the industrial designers happy. Do this right, it's also a pocket video player and usable games console for free.

Since Symbian has lost the plot, if it ever had it, I guess it'll have to run Linux.

For my phone, I don't want a colour screen that can't be read if the backlight is off, nor a camera nor a music player nor "themes". I want a big bright clear screen that can be read sitting on a desk with the backlight off, showing lots of lines of clear text. I want big buttons operable when walking or strap-hanging on a train - not mini-QWERTY! I want it to reach from my ear to my mouth, because that is the way human anatomy is arranged. I want a battery life of a few days not a few hours. But, because it's 2006, I don't just want GPRS and HSCSD, I want 3.5G and EDGE and quad-band. I want fast reliable data as well as voice, anywhere in the world, over USB and infrared and Bluetooth.

What I don't want are hinges or flips or slidey-out bits, because they're too fragile. Make it big enough for the screen to be readable (ear to mouth, remember) and that leaves plenty of room for a big, long-life battery. Its main functions - phone calls, texting, address book and calendar - need to be blisteringly fast and easy to use. It needs to be slim to fit in a pocket, not a squarish brick. Even Blackberries are becoming like this now, after all.

So long as these things aren't compromised, it can have as many other multimedia toys as the designers' cocaine-fuelled imaginations can conceive.

Teenagers are well-served with lifestyle/leisure devices already. Leave them to it, they're happy.

There is a need for devices for adults, for middle-aged business people with aging eyes and uncoordinated thumbs, who don't want to wear earpieces like extras from Star Trek. We need simple, efficient, reliable devices that we can get work done with.

The future is meant to be an improvement on the past.

P. S. All right. If I must have a smartphone, then I want the big bright VGA-res touchscreen of a Zaurus or Universal - or at least the letterbox-shape EGA-res screen of a Nokia 7710. I want keys - the Siemens SX1 had a clever take on this, putting the numbers beside the screen instead of below. Screen-only phones are a pain and so are tiny thumb-boards. Predictive texting isn't hard. Let's have numbers!

The other buttons - voice dialling or memo, volume control, power on, things like that - can go round the edges or something.

Oh, yes, and it needs to work in portrait mode and landscape mode, and switch instantly between them. Recent Palm devices and the Sony-Ericsson P800/900/910 managed this - it can't be that hard. Even my old Zaurus SL-5500 did it once I switched to OpenZaurus.

But really, I think two brains are better than one.