Psion × Smythson

Announced October 8, 1991, at Smythson's New Bond Street shop, the Series 3 Panama was shown to the press on the counter where the 1992 diaries had gone on sale the week before. David Potter had noticed that most Organiser owners still carried a Panama alongside it, and that the diary usually won. The brief to Therefore was one line: replace the diary without asking anyone to stop owning a diary.

Riddiford kept the Series 3 whole and treated it as a text block. The leather boards were cut by Smythson's bindery to overhang the navy ABS by a millimetre and a half, as a book's boards overhang its pages. The free edge of each half was moulded in fine horizontal lines and gilt, so that closed it reads as gilt page edges between two covers. The battery hinge became the spine, wrapped in a navy lambskin band with two raised gilt ribs. The keys were moulded in the pale Nile blue of Featherweight paper, with navy legends.

The software changed as well. Agenda's week view was redrawn to the Panama layout, Monday to Sunday across two facing columns, and the ROM carried Smythson's almanac: bank holidays, quarter days, Royal Ascot, Henley and the Lord's Test. A navy silk ribbon was anchored inside the spine and lay across the keyboard when closed. Psion's engineers argued against it for six weeks before conceding that a ribbon cannot press a key.

Every September Smythson sold a new spine band blocked with the coming year in gold, at £28, and owners queued for it as they had queued for diaries. The Financial Times called it 'the only computer ever sold by the year'. No 1994 band was issued. The twelve proofs blocked in March 1993, the week the bindery stopped cutting boards, are the scarcest thing in Smythson's archive.