Psion responds to "netbook" challengers, says it does so still sell the NetBook Pro
By Donald Melanson 
posted February 27th 2009 7:36PM
posted February 27th 2009 7:36PM
Well, it looks like the dust up between Psion and those using the "netbook" name to describe, um, netbooks, isn't showing any signs of going away anytime soon, with Psion now responding to Intel and Dell's latest charges by saying that, contrary to their claims, it does indeed still sell its NetBook Pro. According to jkOnTheRun, while Psion says it "can understand why people might have assumed that sales ceased a while back," it does in fact still sell the device, with the bulk of its sales being in the "highly specialized supply chain logistics area." As Psion points out, that continuation of sales is key to its argument to keep the trademark from becoming abandoned, and it says it has "all the invoices to prove multi-million dollar sales in the US in 2006 and sales that continue even to this day," adding that, "just because we're not selling tens of thousands through Best Buy doesn't mean we're not entitled to our trademark." That said, we're still a long ways from folks being forced to pay up or stop using the netbook name, although it's at least becoming clear that Psion isn't about to just let this one slide.
I hope Psion wins this case and sends a message to those bully boys Intel and Dell.
I told you guys we should've gone with the name "cheaptop".
Call them the PsionKiller instead, because I won't buy their crap.
Imagine you owned a small company who produced a subcompact car called the Nanocar on a limited scale, and then you stopped manufacturing them for a year only to wake up one day and realize that somewhere along the line everyone started calling their new ultra subcompacts Nanocars. Wouldn't you be kinda annoyed that from that point on everyone who heard your product's name (a name with a reputation of some kind since you managed to sell them to someone, after all) they wouldn't have a clue if it was your product or the other class of products. There goes a lot of word of mouth advertising, there goes your ability to build upon your product's name in the future should you want to continue making your Nanocar at some point.
Psion's in a similar position. Their product line's identity, for better or worse, is in relatively high jeopardy. If they're still selling, have recently sold, still service, or have any at all recent history with a product called Netbook which is a laptop then the name is theirs until they actually abandon it.
Let's call them microbooks and call it a day.
Were great -- yes. I wrote shareware for them: http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/~mcw/php/shareware.html
Were, great. But they're great no more :-(