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Amazing breakthrough in user interface turns PDAs into computers

A new user interface which allows PDA users to open and read desktop computer files from Word, Acrobat and PowerPoint - and more, including embedded video - was easily the most astonishing new product of this week's Symbian Developer Expo.

It doesn't matter whether you have a Palm device, or a Symbian phone or a PocketPC or even a Linux based Zaurus - Picsel's ePage product will let you view files from virtually any source.

You can see a Microsoft Word document on the desktop; you can click on it, and it will open immediately. The same goes for an Adobe Acrobat embedded PDF file.

My first response to hearing this was to object: "Surely, this is not going to work on a tiny PDA screen?"

You pretty much have to go to the Picsel Web site to see why it does work, but I will try to explain, a bit; the trick is worth a paragraph or two. Easily summarised, you might say, the Picsel ePage allows you to look through documents as well as at them; and you can move them around the screen and zoom in and out for detail.

So the page view is a thumbnail at first. A "gesture" with a touch-screen stylus expands it as big as you want it. The gesture is a double-tap on the document, followed by a movement up the display for "expand" or a movement down, for "shrink." Until you take the pen off the screen, it allows you to slide the size of the document up and down, until you're happy; then when you let go, it comes into sharp focus.

The sharp focus is a technology to be whistled at all on its own; it uses unusually clever anti-aliasing to render fonts and detail legible at sizes way below what you might expect.

There is another big surprise - if you've visited the demo site yet you'll have spotted it - Picsel allows you to rotate the screen from portrait to landscape, and back - with just a click. The point is that an awful lot of Web pages and other dodccuments are designed for viewing in landscape format, but most PDAs are in portrait.

This is the point where the demo goes wild. You can keep your first document open, and open another one. It can be a completely different format; most file formats on the PC are supported, including multimedia. So on top of a Word document from a Windows machine, you can overlay a moving video image. And you can listen to the audio track. And if you want, you can cut the one and paste it into the other.

As a real killer demo, they showed me a page which was a full-colour comic book page. It's the whole page, not just a bit. You can actually read each bubble, clearly, by zooming into it, and moving the page around with your stylus. And the centre frame, instead of being the bit where Spiderman kisses the wrong girl, is a full-motion, interactive game of Doom! - again, zoomable, adjustable, and - they swear - playable.

The bad news is pretty easy to get across; you can't buy it.

"We don't have a user licence model for this," Scott McBain confessed. "We're selling this to designers of portable devices, and we hope that several of them will announce products this year."

McBain says that Picsel already has four licences signed. "We have signed deals with Samsung, based on next generation smartphones; they'll be involved with Casio, NTT Docomo, NEC, Sony, Toshiba, Canon; and we've also signed partnerships with Intel and ARM and third parties like B Squared and Omron in the Far East."

The company is working towards licensing its software directly to carriers "and we are now involved with set top boxes, printers, projectors, digital cameras; wherever there's a screen or a printer that needs to be driven, we can bring 'democracy of access' to the device," concluded McBain.

The founders are all old Acorn veterans, working with the ARM family of processors before the first mobile phones appeared with ARM chips in them, and very expert at working in small RAM footprints with slow processors.

I haven't seen anything to match this for years, and I suspect it will make pocket computers useable and acceptable to people who would otherwise never have touched them.

In particular, it is the breakthrough everybody over 35 has been looking for - the "instant zoom" means no more fiddling about for your reading glasses.