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Death of the PDA?
An anonymous reader writes "The Economist has an article proclaiming the death of the PDA. Smart phone sales are predicted to overtake PDA sales this year."
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If the phone has all the properties of a PDA, isn't this a moot point?
.
By the way. .
FIRST POST!!!!
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
Palm Zire 21 - $99 USD
Kyocera 7135 Smartphone - $499 USD.
Until they can close this gap, PDAs aren't going to be dead. And a $400 difference is going to take more than 1 year.
Propz to GNAA
If they mean death as in, "just another step in the evolutionary chain," then I'd agree...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Overpriced day planners
Why the hell would you want to do PDA type stuff on a PHONE that is the size of a peanut with a screen the size of a stamp?
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
I had a PDA given to me and I found it quite useless. They are generally for business men and people with busy lives that need to keep track of all of their appointments, etc. I, for one, have no need for that. Now on the other hand computers and phones are of greater use to a broader population. I think that explains it.
Once we see the first "personal server" come out, there will be no need for the phones to be smart.
What I'm not sure is how the interface to the personal server and the phones will shake out. Ideally, the phones could bluetooth to the server to retreive phone books, etc, but something tells me the phone makers may not want to go this route - though who knows...
grisha.org
The camera-phone was the biggest telecom hit of the past year. Although entry level phones do not yet have cameras standard we may be nearing that feature-set in the next year or so.
Video games and phones are still a mixed bad. The N-Gage was released but sales reports and reviews have been mostly negative. A lot of this can be attributed to Nokia's inexperience in the gaming industry. If Nintendo had developed a mobile phone with the potential to load the vast catalog of GB games then mobile phone gaming could take off like a rocket.
In a few years we might be living in an age where you sign a contract for a year and get a phone which includes the voice unit itself, PDA functionality, MP3 functionality, game functionality, camera functionality and whatever else that is dreamed up in the meantime. I can't wait!
PDA's like BSD are dying!
where all the geeks are drunk and naked.
The article is really predicting the death of PDAs that aren't integrated with phones. This is quite different that the death of ALL PDAs.
All the article is saying is that PDAs will include another feature. PDAs are evolving. Very few things stay the way their were originally intended. Did computers die when we switched from punch cards to keyboards? Not quite. They're still computers, they just aren't exactly what they used to be.
especially the PDAs running *BSD. they are *really* dead
After years of banging away at a keyboard the last thing I want to do is have a machine try to interpret my penmanship.
It works for me.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
She is one of many that bought PDA's and then decided paper and pencil were king. So the Stylus isn't mighter than the pen.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I don't see the point in a distinction. Is it a PDA with phone capabilities? Is it a phone with PDA capabilities? Either way, if this happens, I wouldn't consider it a "death" but an evolution in what technologies and packagings people decide fits their lifestyles the best.
Just because a radio was integrated into a clock doesn't mean that radio died then, although maybe I wish it did.
The headline will be "The Death of Smartphones"
Why ?
Because like the PDA, smartphones are not easy to use.
They are clunky, and their application is limited in scope.
Yes, it may become trendy for some to take pictures with their cellphones and then email (or MMS) the pictures to their friends and families.
Count that as ONE application.
Other than that, what else smartphone (and PDA) can do ?
Not pretty much, except for the mobility factor that the POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) can't provide.
I for one, will still use my cellphone, sans "smartfeatures" because what I need the most from my cellphone is to call someone (or have someone get in touch with me) when I am out of my office.
If I need to take pictures, I can use my digital cameras. If I need to do serious computing stuffs (not only number crunching) I can use my laptop. If I need to jot down something, there're pens and paper. If I need to play games, I have PS/2 / X BOX game systems.
The older alternatives work. I don't need smartphones to try to do all that, which it can't, really.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Why and how could you possible use a pda/phone with the size of phone screens now a days. Now if they make palm pilots into phones and keep their size that would be a smarter investment.
Why can't I have a very thin PDA with a decent screen?
Put the cellular in that, and then make the microphone/earpiece a seperate, wireless part.
That way, I drive down the road, PDA/phone thingy in pocket. I can put on my earpiece and tell the PDA to dial somebody from there.
Expanding...
Take that capability, and eventually ask the PDA (via your headset) to start reciting directions to a location.
I never have to take the phone/pda out of my pocket, and I have full capability.
When I'm not using it as a phone, I can actually see what I'm doing!
Ok, make that one, and my money's on the way.
My mom says I'm cool.
I'd rather have an iPod than a PDA. Calendar, contacts, notes, and music.
I'm getting pretty sick of having so many electronic gadgets to tote around. Laptops are getting lighter and smaller, and combined with wireless they pretty much take up 90% of computing tasks and aren't that big of a deal to carry with you. Now imagine if you're already carrying a laptop and also feel like carrying a cellphone, pda, mp3 player and a digital camera etc. That is a pain. Making the cellphone and pda into one unit is a huge help. If they could cram the mp3 and camera that'd help too. Or ... is there any way to add cellphone functionality to a lap top?
Besides, I doubt that PDAs will merge ONLY with cell phones: PDA functionality is usefull and will be used virtually in all personal devices. And some of those devices will be far away from being called "a cell phone": watches, MP3 players, cameras.
Also, I am sure PDA functionality will expand from wearable devices to... drivable one? I always wanted to have my Palm being built-in to my car dashboard instead of being lost anywahere in my car.
Less is more !
The problem with the PDA is that it doesn't fill a niche. Rather, PDA makers have tried to force a niche into existence.
Nobody needs as much power as a PDA provides, and if they did it would be more economical to get a subnotebook with all the features of a real computer without the clumsy limitations of a PDA. On the low end, a simple organizer is a much better and much cheaper solution than a half-assed PDA like the Palm or a full-blown albatross like the PocketPC.
Smartphones are just the next in this dead line of products. A glorified PDA, the Smartphone is just the same old same old in a newer, smaller package. It's a package that really shouldn't be getting any smaller as the limitations on usable size are already reached with the latest Palm lines.
The solution isn't putting more functionality into a device, it's figuring out what the most necessary features are and making them intuitive. Microsoft used to think about making things more intuitive, but somewhere along the line they let the Bloat Team take over the research department.
I'm still waiting. I want a cell phone that has all the features of a pda so that I don't have to crowd my pockets with another device. But I want a cell phone that runs linux so I can actually make use of it with my computers. Until they get a linux phone out with wireless and network connection, the ability to take periferals, one that plays nice with my windows and linux computers and works with my provider (and preferably has a camera), I'm not going to get one of those fancy phones.
I do security
And now the kind of people who bought PDAs when they were extremely expensive are going to get tablet PCs. Even though digital heralded the "death" of analog, we're still using phones. It's more of the same.
- WrexSoul
\/.
vvv
I kept telling them to GET A ROOM. I guess they finally took my advice.
I RTFA, and I believe it was implying that the death of the PDAs will come. They have tiny sales compared to those of cellphones. And as phones begin to pick up all the features of PDAs, the atricle is quite right.
You like to point out that there is a huge price difference, but you neglect to consider that ALL NEW technologies (or integrations) are expensive at first.
When you can buy $50 cell/smart/pda/phones/integrated email/internet resoucres/etc/etc/etc, then the PDA will be a dead device, ESPECIALLY when a non-wireless PDA won't beable to meet the information demands of the typical person (which are growing FAST). The article's prediction IS CORRECT. They just didn't explicitly say when.
So long PDA! You ARE A RELIC OF THE PAST!
I don't like to replace my Palm OS PDA every year or so. I do like to replace my cell phone as early as possible (read: when the contract expires). I always buy reasonably cheap phones (below $100). I would like to buy mid-range Palms ($200-300), but I want to buy them at a different time from my cell phone. More importantly, when I change cell phone providers, I don't want to change my PDA.
This is an example of one of those trends that might not necessarily be driven by the consumer (unless you're counting Blackberrys)
That's funny!
That's not a bad idea. This way, you can forward those "increase your penis size by 4 inches" emails right along to your penis from your PC.
This will cut out any delays in growing your weiner.
Just be warned: overflowing your penis' inbox will cause serious problems! (depending on your girlfriend of course)
Shut the fuck up! I'm so fucking tired of hearing death of this, death of that. Fucking fuckety fuck.
Ok. Sorry. Continue.
-
Such chips should be implanted into our heads as early as possible (into newborns ideally) in order to train our brains to communicated with Internet "naturally" - means without any other intermeadiate devices.
Also, imagine a Beowulf cluster of us... Wait a minute, would it be called "Matrix"?
Less is more !
more accurately...
palm zire 21 (i know we all buy the absolute cheapest pda's) $99, plus say $199 for a reasonable mobile, equals $298 for nearly slumming it!
versus $499 (retail)...
now if your purchase is subsidized in any way, or if the convenience of not synching your cell and pda is an issue, $200 may not be a bad price differnetial. my bsuiness cell account runs about $250/month.
Back around 1999, when everyone figured 3G was the wave of the future, I figured I'd hold off on a purchase of both a cell phone and a PDA until I got a machine that did both. At the time, I was picturing a machine not unlike an iPaq into which I could slide a 3G wireless PCMCIA card capable of VoIP, which my provider would naturally be using since it's soooooooooo much cheaper than traditional voice calls, at least in theory.
I finally asked for a clearance Palm IIIc for Christmas in 2001 - something with color, but not powerful enough that I'd be tempted to put Linux on it, and cheap enough that I wouldn't feel bad about replacing it in a couple of years.
I got an El Cheapo digital phone and basic Verizon service in early 2002, since they'd rolled out their 2.5G network the previous summer, and the rep said it would be ubiquitous "soon."
As of now, late 2003, I can think of ONE provider that offers 3G connectivity (Sprint), and last I looked, they were still using CDMA for voice calls. They do sell a PCMCIA card compatible with 'Sprint Vision,' but it also uses CDMA for voice.
All this 'picture messaging' I see on TV from T-Mobile and Verizon - is this 3G or it is along the lines of a proprietary FTP over whatever they use for wireless web?
And where is my 3G and VoIP, dammit?!?
pcow
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
To be honest, the most useful PDAs seem to be used as anything but, as they are good for collecting or processing data "in the field", for such tasks as inventory and event tracking. I don't think smart phones will ever fill that particular role, and paper "day planners" and the like will continue to reign supreme when it comes to managing schedules and the like. To be completely honest, cell phones are inadequate when it comes to any sort of non-verbal input. Too bad.
From what I've observed these are the following people who use PDAs. No one else does...
1) business people who keep track of appointments, they download their outlook to these PDAs.
2) teens who think its cool to have one, then get bored of them and lose them in their messy rooms.
3) dorks (read geeks) who think they will be cool too when they have them, and try to look cool entering all sorts of info via the graffity (sp?) input method.
4) extreme dorks (real nerds) who use their PDAs to run webservers and some crazy shit (that actualy is impressive).
So PDAs are dead because the boss of the company who makes the leading smartphone software and someone from Nokia say so. Ok...
unless of course, the trip to blockbuster is to dowload a movie to the hard disk on your cell phone via wi-fi, which charges your cell bill, which connects to your television... and plays your movie.
perhaps the idea of a personal server is not for your average consumer.
Dude give it up, PDAs are dying. And I'm not trolling either.
They are a stagnat (sp?) nich market that really has no hope of growth.
Just because your a dork and think your cool by using a PDA shouldn't mean you lose all objectivity when considering, "are PDAs dying?"
They are dying, relax.
Didn't you hear? Bluetooth is dead, and along with it, the PAN.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
One of the more neat thing's i've seen is a mobile PALM based phone. While I've never been a big fan of the Palm Pilot, I have to say it's among the more useful devices i've seen.
The only issue I see with putting too many things onboard a single device is compatibility. We have AMPS, GSM, CDMA just to name a few and there is no real assurance that the frequency of your phone matches that of the carrier you want to use.
Let's say I had an analog mobile PDA (I believe still common place in Asia). Very useful device if you can get the service, which I'm sure I could get where I live for a higher then normal fee. It would be more practical to toss the phone in favor of a new phone.
What I'd like to see is something like a cardbus or similar mobile phone that would fit onto a laptop, PDA, or PC. This way I can actually pick a PDA of my choice, and have a choice as to what sorta packaging my phone had, from a minimal cheep 10 digit display, to a full fledged device with all the bells and whistles.
Liberated women don't wear parachute bloomers!
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - PDA brand PALM Pilot was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss them - even if you didn't enjoy thier work, there's no denying their contributions to popular geek culture. Truly a bussiness icon.
-------
Support Indy Music. Buy
Oh, I'm sorry. I missed it. PDAs suck!
The laptops of today do all the things a desktop is supposed to do, but occupy less space.
All proclaim the death of the desktop computer!
The PDAs of today do all the things a laptop is supposed to do, but occupy less space.
All proclaim the death of the laptop computer and, indirectly, the desktop computer!
The phones of today do all the things a PDA is supposed to do, but occupy less space.
All proclaim the death of the PDA computer and, indirectly, the laptop computer and, indirectly, the desktop computer!
We've been told that sub-notebooks are about to replace the notebook and "desktop replacements" are about to replace the desktop for years now. It hasn't happened yet.
Will smartphones replace PDAs?
When smartphones, like the latest batch of Ipaqs or Toshibas, support bluetooth, wifi, multiple I/O capable expansion options (CFII+SDIO) and an extensive list of peripherals, sure.
Maybe "laptop" and "desktop" and "PDA" describe nothing but a form factor. But that's probably the best argument there is for their mutual survival. There's no reason the PDA form factor with PDA size screen will just magically disappear leaving a gap between laptop and phone.
That's million with an M. Not going down but staying steady or flat as they put it. Freaking analyists, this isn't about the viablilty of the business or the technology. This is purely about them not being able to make money off the stock price. To these people your company is a failure if they can't make money off you. Nevermind if you are actually making a nice profit. Feh!
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
there will always be people who don't want a phone with them all day. PDAs will still be good for them
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
First, there were the "brick" phones, the ones that weighed 20 pounds and had an antenna like a foot long.
Then over time they shrank all the way down until the hottest thing going were these tiny digital hamster pellet phones that people keep could barely find in their cavernous shirt pockets.
But now they've got to be "smart" so we're back to putting these "heavy flow maxi"-sized things against our head again, with a complete qwerty keyboard rubbing on our five-o-clock shadow.
So when do we get back down to peanut-size again? Presumably this time it will be a color LCD peanut with a stylus the size of a sewing needle.
If I want to do something that requires a bigger screen (like watch a movie and actually enjoy it), I use a 15" laptop. I'm sure there's room for devices inbetween - bag-size rather than pocket-size, but a decent resolution display can be very usable even on a pocket-sized device.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Takes too long to input information into it. A big waste of time.
Not until I can talk to it, or type on a full size keyboard (qwerty, dvorac, whatever) will I be happy with how the pdas are turning out. I think cell phones need to be smaller too.. =D Oh, and humans have to have an established colony on mars. And while you're at it cure HIV. And don't forget to clone humans with gills.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
I'd much rather have a small cell phone and an even smaller PDA. Granted, I only use my PDA to store contact information as well as a couple one-time-passwords, but the setup works very well for me.
And, (call me paranoid, but) do you really feel comfortable handing over your most holy information to a stranger? It's one thing if someone asks to borrow your phone in the event of an emergency, but do you really want to hand-over your PDA at the same time? I like to keep important information close to me at all times.
You get a gold star!
once the government has a way into our heads and can read our thoughts.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Grumpy old man that I am, I am trilled I avoided being seduced by the PDA craze. Now hopefully I'll be able to avoid being seduced by the cell-phone craze. (Not very hopeful there.) After all, I am at the point in my life where I am trying to avoid people getting in touch with me. Also, I only have so much money, have to be judicious where to waste it.
I think I'd like my PDA without cell-phone features thanks.
I am probably in the minority, but I am never again getting a cell phone. I don't like getting phone calls in the first place, even when I'm at home. But I'll admit it's useful.
Cell phones, on the other hand, let me be annoyed by other people wherever I go and as a bonus I get to annoy other people around me. They typically charge ridiculous per-minute billing even for local or incoming calls, unless you pay through the nose for a super-duper-flat-rate (but probably only when the planets are aligned and the moon is 3 degrees above the horizon).
So yeah, I'm happy with my cell-phone-less existance. No cell-phone-PDAs for me. Gimme a big screen and a stylus over a numeric keypad anyday.
Random and weird software I've written.
Starfleet hack: This new communicator is sure to make the tricorder and PAD obsolete.
Engineer: Ye Gads! It's attached itself to the warp plasma feed. It's drawing power at a phenominal rate....!!!..The antimatter and matter feeds just openned to maximum.
Android: It appears to have become sentient. It's controlling our systems to maximize it's feeding potential.
Doctor: I believe it's about to start reproducing sort of like the way tribbles do.
Klingon: Swings batleth.
Communicator: Displays blue screen and dies.
Captain: Well that was a waste of time. Mabey Starfleet will do more testing before they get the next model from Redmond.
Well, I guess he's the one who'd know, right? Who better to tell everyone you're dead than your most serious competitor.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
I assert that there will always be PDA as long as I have a girlfriend. Oh wait, a minute, I don't have a girlfriend. Maybe PDA is dying.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
"The PDA is dead, long live the PDA."
The article describes how some PDAs with a phone capibility are essentialy the same device as a smartphone. The two technologies have overlapped, that is all.
Im staring to think posters dont even RTFA. Not a wise move here on slashdot.
until it includes:
1. Telephone
2. PDA
3. GPS
and fits comfortably in my hip pocket.
Other features like FRS, waterproof/resistant, rugged (hip pocket == sat on), bluetooth wireless modem for laptop, camera, etc. would serve to differentiate models.
I use my iPAQ so little now, that once I can find a way to sync my Nokia 3650 with LookOut and only sync specific categories, I'll be selling my iPAQ 3850. Smaller, gets the job done for what I need, and one less device to carry.
$ man woman *
-bash:
New improved apps appear by magic with no change to your dumb-smart-phone, with software upgrades at the main office.
The phone is cheep, and the semi-expensive server with all the cool software, gets shared between hundreds if not tens of thousands of users.
It really only needs to be a stripped down web browser.
Letter To Iran
Nah, some day they'll prolly just have some chip you put into babies and then you just pay to activate it's different services, PDAs and Cell phones merging is such kid stuff :P
true tho, alot of ppl use the cells instead of the PDAs these days, especially those who still use day planners and stuff (I know many ppl, mostly non-geeks but hey), although as evidenced by the 8 gazillion ppl on campus these days with cell phones, the cells are certainly eclipsing PDAs in the sheer numbers race.
You win battles by knowing the enemy's timing, and using a timing which the enemy does not expect. Miyamoto Musashi
Cellphones will become extinct as PDAs with cellphone capabiltiy become common!
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
2. quick response of the buttons
3. speaker phone with echo cancellation etc.
4. some kind of voice commands to set calender entries
5. voice reminder about meetings
6. small calculator
7. auto button lock
8. No java--please don't crash my phone ...
9. GPS
10. Proximity applications, like you know how far your friend is from you by sending your GPS co-ordinates, and how to reach there
I am very happy with the phone I have. It does not have all these features but close.
- People who believe other people have no right to live, got no right to live ...
As noted elsewhere, most of the problems that the PDA has are also held by the SmartPhone. Namely they have a limited utility compared to a PC, and about half the things that they actually do, no-one will ever use.
I agree that the personal server idea isn't all that great either.
Using a cell phone display for anything other than text pager level information seems to me to be an exercise in futility. I suppose with a flip open display along the lines of the ngage, or some of the other phones it might work ok, but then you are getting back to taking up too much space.
For the near future, I suspect that the cell phone will continue to get enhancements until someone realizes that they are not worth the extra cash, and arn't selling.
Longer term I suspect that the cell phone will become a personal terminal. You will enter cryptograhic keys, it will create a link to your home and work systems using those cryptographic keys to tunnel through whatever wireless network is available (Digital cell, analog cell, wi-fi, Magnetic field, something else) and pull your contact list off of your Outlook or Evolution client at work and or home, and allow you to browse that.
Even longer term, you will have a computer at home or at work that will be always on, and you will build one tunnel to that where you will use something like VoIP to talk to your server and ask it verbally to connect you to the appropriate meeting, or person, and your system at work will set up that call, negotiating with various carriers to get the best rate, and transparently shifting you from one system to another as better rates show up.
You want to play games? A list of games available on your server, or on other systems becomes available. Play head to head with they guy next to you, or against someone arround the world. Or jump into an arbitrary mmug.
You want to go off line, Tell your server not to bother you unless the Cubs win the World Series, or you ask to be back in the world.
Then again, who knows. With NanoTech building, we could all end up having the technological equivalent of telepathy, where we communicate without any obvious external interfaces.
Who knows.
For the time being I don't see laptops or desktops going away either.
But I could be wrong.
-Rusty
You never know...
You can get a cheapo phone with basic organiser capabilities for half the price of the Zire, free on a plan, even with colour. Consider also that most people with a PDA will probably have a cellular phone too, and would see benefit in carrying one device rather than two.
What you're looking for is a phone with no more than the specs of the Zire (PalmOS, moderate resolution B/W display, 8 MB RAM, no camera etc), and I think that could appear in the near future for maybe $150-200, or around that of the Zire and a phone.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
What happens when the phone service craps out? Like all the fucking time? Then you don't have your info? Sounds stupid to me. Reminds me of the old Network Computer (NC) idea, which was horrid.
I travel a lot, and need something to keep track of people & calendar. In the last year I had a Treo, a P800, and a Nokia 3650.
The Treo is OK - on the plus side it has the highly usable Palm OS, but the battery is a dog (you have to charge it every day), and the Palm OS is not evolving fast enough. No bluetooth, etc.
The P800 is a flashy brick. It's heavy, and drains the batteries as quickly as Treo. The Symbian software is OK, but not nearly as functional as Palm... Take setting up a meeting time for example - the Symbian UI is as braindead as the PocketPC garbage - clearly designed by programmers and not people who actually need to go through the process a few times a day. Fortunately, the P800 is programmable enough to allow third-party software to take over most of the PDA functions. (check out http://www.my-symbian.com for a good collection!)
Also on the negative side, the P800 phone interface is awful - very hard to use one-handed, and highly annoying and counter-intuitive in a lot of places (take my word, I struggled to switch for over a month). Don't bother with the camera.
For now I settled with the Nokia 3650 (the one with the funky key layout) - it's not nearly as heavy as the P800, no touchscreen, but the UI is far more functional. It's no Palm, but can be programmed - the battery life is much better than then P800 as well. The camera seems borderline usable, too.
The 3650 is still a cruddy PDA - my contact list is huge, but I call relatively few of these people - Symbian makes it difficult to solve this problem. The to-do list shows the first 12 characters of each item, but in a huge font - with no means to change it. Again, designed by programmers.
In case you were curious the key layout is easy to learn, but difficult to navigate with one hand - if you're righ handed chances are you will not be able to easily reach keys 7, 8 or 9. Don't these companies actually test these designs???
In summary, it's all cr1p. Don't throw away your PDA yet (unless you're not a big PDA user in the first place).
Jan
This is only a "death" in as much as a phoenix dies and is reborn from its own ashes. The PDA isn't dying, it's evolving. Mind you, I'm a big nerd, but I see phone/PDA combos as a PDA that can act as a phone, not a phone that does PDA stuff, too. Yeah, eventually PDAs that don't have a cell phone will not be nearly as common as they are now, but they won't be "dead" for a long time.
;P
But we can hardly blame the Economist, after all, proclaiming the Death of Technology "foo" is a great way to increase page views!
The Free desktop that Just Works
It's not that PDA's are dead, but that the disconnected PDA is dead (which is why all Palm's have a HotSync port). Eventually, every PDA will have wireless capability instead (wifi, bluetooth, cellular but maybe using the same account as ones cell phone, or some combination of the previous). People will buy PDA's with readable size displays to use to configure their cell phones, many of which will still have awful user interfaces on tiny displays in order to stay small and fashionable. The fashion cell phone market is far larger than the geek market.
some people will bitch about phones having tiny little mini chicklet sized keys that their big adult fingers can't comfortably navigate...
PDAs have been an expensive failure since way back in the days of GRID... how many hundreds of millions of dollars do we need to spend to learn that a calculator with poor input devices just isn't going to cut it...
In order for PDA or phones or any other ultra portables to truly exist and work well there needs to be better input devices available, full color and larger screens (even if simulated through maginification)...
Palm has the right general size/factor - but lacks real input devices, memory, ability to run real applications...
PDAs have been for the past decade what the bean counters and other wannabes carry around to impose their status... Useless consumer items, like their owners.
Until they can create a PDA that is for everyone, the sexy and sleek PDAs will be only for those who want to shell out $400 dollars. Why don't everyone get a PDA?
/w 4GB+ of space(for mp3s, data, etc), has 'good' games, can read email/send text messages, easy internet via phone over wireless link(and cheap), ebook support, etc. then I might just buy it because of the mp3s + it gives me other features.
My personal reasons on how I felt:
- you look like a snob or a show-off at college/university when you pull it out of your pocket(believe me you get the 'looks' and it's not a nice feeling amongst your poor buddies)
- it's a good 'data model' for people that work with lots of appointments, TODOs, contacts, etc. I.e. for a programmer like me, it is nearly worthless. For a student, the best it could do is write down homework and chapters to read. But such 'data' comes in couple of weeks a time, so a diary or notepad is good enough. But for the business guy or the BOSS, it's wonderful. This is the #1 reason I find that people lose interest quickly after spending $$$ on it. If it's not going to help you, then you might as well trash it.
- extra features like web browsing, taking pictures, or playing mp3s are worthless. With the limited memory capacity, doing any of these things requires quite a bit of storage space. Managing expensive memory-cards sucks, just so that you can handle more info. Want pictures? Get a camera. Want to play mp3s? Get an iPOD. Every web-site talks about 'what if you could find out where you are on the road'. Who gives a flying fuck about such limited use feature? It's not like I'm playing GTA, and need to know where "Lenny Hideout" is located.
In a nutshell, PDA's just don't have much appeal to the mainstream market and it's just another expensive toy. If PDA's want to succeed, then it's going to have to be very multifunctional for a 'widerange' of audiences.
Hell, if I had a PDA
But at the end of the day, why buy a PDA? When a laptop could do the above and a lot more(though it costs double/triple the money).
Yes, it may become trendy for some to take pictures with their cellphones and then email (or MMS) the pictures to their friends and families.
That's a camera phone, not a smartphone. Not comparable to PDAs.
If I need to take pictures, I can use my digital cameras. If I need to do serious computing stuffs (not only number crunching) I can use my laptop. If I need to jot down something, there're pens and paper. If I need to play games, I have PS/2 / X BOX game systems.
Let's see you fit all that in your pocket :-)
Seriously, the whole point of a smartphone is not that it matches the capabilities of any one of those items, but that it provides the basic capabilities of all of them, in one convenient device that is always with you. And they're integrated, which makes for some interesting new capabilities.
I have a digital camera, a laptop, pen and paper and even an XBox, and I use them all, on occasions. I also have a smartphone, and I use it more than any one of those devices, mostly because it's right there in my pocket, not back at home.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Actually, the reason the N-Gage isn't doing well is because it sucks. Read every review about it and everyone says to wait a revision or so. Java on cellphones has been a huge hit, and don't forget games on the PDA. Nonetheless, text-entry on the cellphone is clunky at best, and until we start seeing some newer style of input (there are good ones out there) we won't see the cellphone take over. Also, the screen is another big point -- the cell phone must be big to have a decent screen, and then you've screwed the whole point of a cellphone -- highly mobile communication.
It will be interesting to see if these devices ever truly converge or if we will continue to see them seperated by the newest features that cannot be put on to a cellphone yet and are on a PDA.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Unless you don't want a cell phone, or aren't required to have one for your job.
I love my Zaire 71. It's a nice size, and does what I want it to (organize my crap) without a lot of extra BS. Cell phone? No thanks. I don't need one more thing to be forgetting to turn off and taking out to annoy my friends during dinner, movies, conversation, trying to take a dump in peace, etc.
And last time I checked, you didn't need a credit check and an $800 deposit to get a PDA like you do with a cell phone. (Of course, the last time I checked on getting a cell phone was 1997, so admittedly that's not saying much of anything.)
But if you really want to, you can get a Bluetooth keyboard and carry it around with your PDA...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Are PDAs merging with phones or are phones merging with PDAs?
By the look of things, it seems as if you could proclaim that the traditional cell phone is on its last legs, and that in the next 5 or 10 years phones that provide nothing but voice and SMS capability will be few and far between. This does not mean that cellphones are dead as well as it does not mean that handheld computers are dead.
It could be said - and perhaps much more accurately - that this current transition will only be the death knell of widespread useage of single-purpose handheld portable communication and computation devices.
But that's not a very good headline, now is it?
I don't really care if some people buy cell phones that incorporate PDA functionality. I don't own a PDA and I don't want one. I DO own a cell phone and I'd like to use it to make voice calls. Unfortunately as long as AT&T pushes customers to their US GSM network, the probability that you can make a voice call in many parts of the country goes down. I'm sick of having non-phone features crammed into phones while voice service gets worse. Do these guys remember that they are selling phones?
I don't see the point of your retort, if anything it give lie to the original point.
they wouldn't use the tower to make a call to a phone that is in the same room/shopping centre as me. Of course, if smart phones had direct phone to phone capabilities it would be a little harder to justify charging me an absurd amount per minute.
How we know is more important than what we know.
PDA choice nowadays is a religion, just like OSs. Even with the same PDA OS you have your die-hard Sony, Palm or (much less so nowadays) Handspring devotees, attached to various features of the devices offered by a particular vendor. Once you integrate the phone and PDA your choices dwindle, at least for the forseable future. Especially in the fragmented US market I see a truly generic PDA phone less likely, because the vendor would have to create versions for at least GSM and CDMA, and for the latter several versions for various carriers (Sprint, Verizon).
I just love it when ppl break out their crystal balls and start saying that something is going to "die".
Why oh why does such drivel even get published!? Now, don't anwser that. Thats a whole other can of worms and we might as well try to stay on topic here.
I own no less than 3 Palms and have keyboards for 2 of them. (I can plug any of them into the 2 keyboards but you get the idea.) The 2 IIIc's I have are getting a little long in the tooth but they still function pretty well. My 550c is a little more modern but it still could use an upgrade too even.
Also let me throw in here that I do have a laptop as well as the number of computers on my home network to use so I'm pretty much covered when it comes to computing in all it's forms.
Now, having said that, let me also now say that I've been in the market for a new cell phone too and while the little ones that are PDAs are neat, they could never replace my PDAs for a few reasons:
1. As has been pointed out in this thread a few times, I would not be able to access my PDA very easily if I was using my phone. I can see how that would get old real quick.
2. If I'm using my PDA/Phone I'm using up charge on it. If my PDA dies it's not a huge deal but it does not effect my ability to make a call.
3. While some of the new PDA/Phones have decent sized screens they still are always smaller than a full sized PDA. They rarely offer much in the way of stylus room and no, I don't want my phone to get bigger.
4. I've not looked that hard but I don't think very many of them come with the keyboard option. If they do, well thats cool that would remove this point but I'm pretty sure that the majority of them don't and even if only that is true it would limit my available list of phones that I would be willing to buy.
In short, I'm not sure I can even understand why anyone would think that any "tool" would "die". They may adapt and evolve but I think that PDAs serve a market that is quite diffrent than a cell phone. Cell phones may incorpirate some of the features that are on PDAs but they really are two diffrent things as far as I'm concerned.
(Side note, the one thing that I have been thinking about is the camera phones. While the image quality is not great it would be neat to be able to just carry a phone/camera. It would not be a subistute for a real digital camera but I don't always need one of those on me. And using a camera is not the same as trying to use a phone and a PDA at the same time.)
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
However, when everything supports Bluetooth, it becomes a non-issue. Leave your phone on and in your pocket ready to receive calls. Want to check your email? Whip out your Tungsten T, fire up VersaMail and check your favorite IMAP account. Or use Web Pro to check any web site. Your Palm will connect to your Bluetooth phone using your personal area network and establish an Internet connection. It rocks. When you want to make a phone call, you don't have to use a PDA to do it! That's the best part! You have all the features of your favorite phone (so long as your fav. phone supports Bluetooth) with no compromises. You can even use Graffiti to send SMS messages. Much better than a smart phone.
Better still, your calendar, contact, and other pda stuff syncs with your desktop machines (using Bluetooth if you want, so you don't have to buy an extra cradle for the office). This stuff is available now, it's not a pie-in-the-sky dream. Some people may object to carrying more than one item, but meh, I've given in and just bought a bag to carry crap in. Hell, I had a bag when I was in university to carry books and frankly that kicked ass. Now I can carry my Minidisc player, flash card reader, Tungsten, phone, and digicam when I need to.
And I don't need to buy one crappy device that combines an MP3 player (I currently use Minidiscs), flash memory (I currently use a portable SmartMedia/Compact Flash reader/writer as a "USB Key"), PDA, phone, and digital camera that compromises all of those items (the digital cameras in these smart phones/pdas make me want to cry). The article talks about smart phones that play music. Great. Probably 128 MB MP3 players. I would never use that.
Smart phones aren't the way of the future; wireless personal area networks are. And ways to take them with you. And hopefully not get them stolen.
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
I think the only thing thats going to die is the high prices of these devices. I still carry around an old Palm III that works perfectly well for looking things up when I don't have a laptop or other computer handy. Sometimes I don't WANT to have a phone with me, to hear it ring or feel it vibrate, I just want to have a database/notepad of some sort and I haven't seen any cell phones that do that function all that well without a magnifying glass to go with them.
When my Palm III eventually dies I fully expect to go into Walmart or some such place and get something similar for $50 or less. Maybe it will be a Casio device instead of a Palm. In a way, it's too bad that Palm and Handspring got distracted by competing only at the high end with each other and with Microsoft. At what it probably costs to stamp out these circuit boards they could have chosen instead to saturate the market with a $50 device. Maybe it's not too late for such a strategy to succeed. Someone will do it, soon, and at a profit.
I understand the needs of doctors in the information age. Although multiple devices exist to satisfy our needs, we still do not have a device which can do it all. I was very frustrated today trying to find a device which did all of the following so I figured I would contact Handspring and see what they can do. Although the Treo 600 does some of the items below, it does not do everything. Maybe we can see a device like this soon?
* I need a Palm-based PDA with sufficient amount of RAM so I can load my medical/Drug reference programs (e.g. ePocrates).
* A stereo audio (mp3, personal notes, etc) player along with a voice memo recorder and input for a headset for voice conferencing.
* Ability to play various video formats as well.
* Bluetooth would be a huge plus for wireless headset while driving or syncing with computer or as a Bluetooth modem for laptop web access.
* I need a full fleged browser (not just WAP) so I can get onto internet via 802.11b wifi
* Ability to grab and send email via phone data services or wifi or bluetooth.
* I need to be able to use VoIP services like Dialpad or something similar to take care of international calls when I am near a WiFi network (although I do not think dialpad offers a Palm client).
* Ability to view and edit Office documents and sync with outlook (also ability to open attachments).
* I would like a high-res camera built in.
* Another wish list item include a built in "webcam" for video conferencing (if possible).
* Ability to install more than 256 megs of programs/databases in internal memory.
* SD I/O slot
* High-resolution screen
* Ability to make and receive phone calls via a normal GSM and/or CDMA cellular network (switchable via modules).
Once this is all in a handheld, then I can ditch a mini-notebook computer. Until then, I'll have to have a big notebook (Dell Precision M60), mini notebook (Sony PCG-U101), along with headset (USB headset for laptop and bluetooth headset for cell phone), webcam (Logitech USB laptop cam), PDA, camera, mp3 player/recorder, miniDV camcorder, and cell phone. I guess that is why a convergence device is so tempting.
If Palm or anyone else is listening, build one now!
I would like to know how good GPS is on PDA
Pocket PC, Palm based or Zaurus.
which company makes the best CompactFlash/GPS adaptor or are the bluetooth units any good.
what about wardriving with a pda?
smoke em if you got em
-- doing the things a particle can
Very few manufacturers see desktops as a leading product because margins are practically zero. Laptops are the only product that allows meaningful differentiation at this point, and as a result, profit margins worth caring about.
I'd say just the opposite, that the PDA features that Apple has been grudgingly adding to the iPod over the past few years are Jobs' admittance that people want a PDA. Remember, many of the PDA-like features that you mentioned started out as third party hacks that were rolled into the official firmware after Apple realized that the features were actually useful. I'm willing to bet that in a few years, there's going to be an iPod 3 or whatever that has an optional keyboard you can plug in so that you can manage your ever-growing contact info. The spirit of the newton will be there, it just won't be called that because of Jobs' immense ego^Wvision.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
if these suckers had the sim card slot enabled it would beat the pants of anything else in the market, awesome screen wifi and bluetooth
compact flash and sdio
the 2210 would be nice if it had sim feature aswell
-- doin the things a particle can
The author is desperately trying to sound like he has some earth-shaking news here... but all he's done is observe a natural evolution in electronics that people have known was going to happen for at least the past 5 years. His observation is as brilliantly obvious as looking at WindowsXP and declaring the death of WindowsME. WindowsXP incorporates some of the past features and adds some enhancements... just like a Smartphone adds phone capabilities to a PDA and keeps some PDA elements.
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
Everybody is forgetting the main cost... AIRTIME!
The cost of acquiring the beast is not that much. What costs is airtime. I have been looking at both a smart phone and a PDA. Conclusion is that a smart phone is not the device for me. Everybody may be going goo goo ga ga, but they are missing the point that smart phones tend to have very little RAM, tend to use the networks all the time, etc. A PDA can use 802.11x and can have oodles of RAM. And a smart phone will always have a small screen. Ok the Ericsson is not bad, but the device is a beast.
No, I see this as yet another attempt by the device makers to jump start a flagging market.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Why? I often talk on the phone while USING the PDA at the same time.
Yes, some cell phones have a speakerphone mode (I have one) and some combo PDA/cell phones allow you to plug in a headset, but the voice quality isn't as good.
Cell phones are dead and being replaced by PDA's with phone functionality.
Until those "smart phones" come with digestible user fees, usb ports through which they sync with my PC, don't have screens the size of postage stamps, have useable keyboards (I prefer graphiti) and don't cost 1000$CND, I'll be sticking to using my new palm thanks.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Palm's current models, trying to outdo WinCE stuff, has made the PDA less useful.
My original Palm Pilot, then a III, then a V and now a Vx, are simple, last a long time on battery, and easy to carry around.
Rather than either keeping it simple and making it cheaper, OR making it better in a useful way, they just added crap featuritus like movie playing (WTF would I want to play a crappy PDA movie for?), girth, less battery and moving parts (that look silly too). Sorry, but the Tungsten line isn't making me want to upgrade. With 1/4 my Vx's battery life (dies in a week dead; I took my Vx to europe for a month, using it a lot, and didn't even need a charger, plus it turns off for weeks before it actually dies and loses your data), that goofy slide thing and its a bit spendy, especially considering how many V/505s there are out there. They should make a super cheap 505, but I spose there's no profit in that.
Palm dropped the ball long ago. And who needs a seperate device now, since my iPod carries all my data (+ gads more of everything) and my Sony Ericson phone lets me edit contacts and notes (not as handy, but Palm + grafitti is an extra thing to carry + ~$300 -- Not attractive.)
I think convergence will eventually happen, but I wish it would look somewhat different and take advantage of some useful technologies. You still want a large screen to view lots of info, so convergence towards phone-size displays is bad. You also want a SEPARATE handset so you can read the screen and talk at the same time. How about moving the communications guts of the phone into the PDA and connecting a separate handset to it via Bluetooth? Perhaps make an oversized pen than also doubles as a handet. That would still make taking notes during a call pretty difficult, so maybe just use a regular old Bluetooth headset instead.
It's always seemed funny to me that cell phones are moving more and more away from being phones, and more and more to being PDAs.
Think about it -- what's considered to be the latest "killer" cell phone application? Text messaging. Which device is better suited for managing the input and reading of text? The PDA.
The really weak area for PDAs right now is the dismal state of wireless communications. Really -- this should have been taken care of long ago. The technologies exist (if only certain countries would get their acts together and get their networks on something approching a single standard...) to do this, and PDAs are a vastly better fit (notwitstanding the lack of wireless features in the bulk of them).
I'm a tech gadget person, but I absolutely refuse to be tied to a cell phone. I don't want people calling me everywhere I go, and I hardly feel the need to talk on the phone anytime I leave my home or office. If someone needs me, they can e-mail me instead.
E-mail is something I'd access on-the-road through my Workpad c505 if I could, however. And Instant Messaging/Text Messaging is something else I'd probably use. But the necessary extra hardware to get this to work is costly and adds bulk -- something else to be avoided at all costs.
Maybe one of these days if bluetooth takes off I'll be able to get a bluetooth/cell gateway for my car or somesuch.
Yaz.
I'm glad I never blew several hundred dollars on a PDA now. I bet all-y'all be feelin' stoopid!
If economists were prophets (pun intended), we wouldn't have depressions.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Ever tried entering an email on a mobile phone? Its pure horror.
You can't oversee your sentence (unless you have font size -1), so you are bound to make grammatical mistakes. If you are a techie who thus uses his or her mobile phone to enter an e-mail to your average PHB, he will read it all wrong and it will get you fired.
That takes away your smart phone which was ofcourse property of the company you worked for. Thus you have no other solution but to use your old Palm Pilot again, and suddenly realizing things aren't halve so bad as with that fancy smart phone...
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Because, it will be cooler to do that then have a standalone PDA. The sheep want form over function.
... the death of the PDA running BSD, since most PDAs will soon be running Linux (except for the really expensive ones with short battery life, which will be running WinCE).
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
....is a PDA like the Palm Tungsten T3 that has phone/WiFi capabilities. I'd shell out a lot of cash for something like that. I know all-in-one devices are typically frowned upon, but I figure an all-in-one communication device would be something worth looking into. I mean, I don't think I'm alone in saying that I don't like carrying around multiple devices. I really want a PDA but I already have a phone I take with me everywhere. If I could get a good, small (but not horribly small) PDA that could operate as a phone, I'd be ecstatic.
I declared the death of Laptops years ago when PDAs were introduced... oh, wait.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
There's a difference between a dead market and a stagnant market. It's like saying that paper notebooks are dead because Post-it-Notes sales far exceed them. Well for one, they both serve different purposes like smart phones and PDAs. Most people who buy cell phones these days do like the extra features, but I doubt few people actually buy a phone to use its organizer features. They buy them for the multiple ring tones, the color screens, etc.
For that matter, people who predicted that PDAs would be become universal still might be right. Unfortunately this generation of PDAs and cell phones still do not live to the hype of a few years ago. There are still several hurdles that must be overcome for that to happen.
PDA and cell phone design have always been a compromise between size and user interface. Bascially the smaller the device, the more difficult it is to use because of the smaller interface. Until we get holographic interfaces, this will always be a key design limitation.
Perhaps the main reason why PDAs lag behind smart phones is that many people don't want or need an organizer. Sure they want an address book with their phones but how many people actually use an organizer. A PDA, although it has increased in features, is still used primarily as an paper organizer replacement. In some markets they do serve as mini-terminals but this market is small. While hybrids like the Treo do combine features of both, the technology is not advanced enough to where the masses will use it. Personally I think that when PDAs and/or cell phones are like digital assistants the organizational features of both will be underused. Until then, they will continue to have separate markets.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The PDA was a cool tech "toy" when it came out, and every "geek" wanted to have one. After enough of us techno-geeks were seen roaming around with them, the rest of the public started taking interest in them - wondering what they were missing out on.
Now that most people have had a chance to look at one/use one, they've learned that they're not really as great as they sounded; They're only good if you have them handy to whip out and use when you need one.
Almost all of my co-workers who bought Palms or PocketPC's ended up leaving them in the glovebox of their cars, or on the dressers at home - after only a few months. If you try to put them in your back pants pocket, you end up sitting on them and breaking the screen. They're not bad in a coat pocket, but that doesn't help you in summer months (or warm climates!). Women can put them in their purses, at least - but they still have the hassles of dead batteries and risk of getting stolen or dropped and broken. On top of all that, they're known to crash on occasion, rendering them useless until you can get back to a PC to hotsync your data back into them again.
The Smartphone/PDA combo makes lots of sense to people like me. If I have to enter everyone's name and number into my phone anyway for speed-dial, why not just put that data in the address book portion of the built-in PDA instead? The phone flips closed and becomes smaller than a PDA, making it possible to clip it onto my belt and take it with me without so much hassle. It also solves my need for wireless Internet connectivity in a PDA. (Before I got my first smartphone, I actually shelled out the bucks for a Palm VIIx for that functionality. It was a horribly overpriced and oversized solution though.)
If there's one thing really holding back adoption of smartphone/PDA combos right now, it's probably the price. The Kyocera QCP-7135, for example, doesn't even use the latest version of PalmOS, yet it's nearly impossible to buy one for less than around $500. Then, once you get it, you're still going to want to shell out another $50-80 for a smartmedia card to slide into it - because there's not enough memory storage in the phone itself to use features such as the built-in MP3 music player.
The other, less known, "gotcha" with the smartphones I've used is tendency to crash/freeze-up! On a seperate PDA, this is bad enough - but on a smartphone, crashes can cause the phone to do such nasty things as appear to still function, but stop ringing on incoming calls, or get stuck in "roam" mode until they're hard-reset.
Ummmmmmmmmmmm,
Why, the following is a classic from Slashdot's vaults circa October 1993...
Slashdot was not founded in 1993. It was founded in 1998 I believe. Although I would like a Gopher version of slashdot.
Photos.
LOL. Is this like Bill Gates declaring Linux dead? Actually no, it's the opposite since smartphone is the underdog. This is more like Linus Torvalds or Steve Jobs declaring Microsoft dead. Why is this newsworthy?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I think you are wrong. If roughly 2% of the 500M or so cell phones sold next year have built in filofaxes, they have sold more PDA-phones than PDAs that year. Sounds likely to me, regardless of price.
This does not mean that the PDA is dead though. Lots of people want a tiny phone and a separate PDA with large screen and built in keyboard. I will keep my IPAQ.
I think the whole handheld-device range will eventually(over maybe 100 years) converge into a single simple-to-use device that is your computer, no distinction between laptop and desktop, which you can plug into terminals to get a larger screen and extra peripherals with. From there, specific uses like a phone or playing music are included in Swiss-Army-Knife fashion.
For right now, though, such a device is unfeasable with existing standards and technology, so instead we have the smart phone and pda. They'll both stick around regardless of sales, I think.
There isn't a happy medium here. The trend for PDA's is driven by the need for usable (large enough) screens. With cell phones the trend is to make them smaller. All the cell-phone screen has to do is show you digits dialed and phone-book entries.
Convergence (with one exception) either leaves you with a PDA that's too small to be useful or a cell-phone that's too big for you to want to carry it around.
The REAL solution? A smartphone that you don't hold up to your ear, but that uses bluetooth to a stand-alone headset. I might be able to deal with that. MAYBE.
I wanted to stand in line to buy OQO in the summer one year ago when it was supposed to be released. I am still searching for this line, anybody can help me?
iSync is from the same guys that froze hell
It's really important telephones can be operated single-handedly, while the typical operations you perform with a PDA are more comfortable with two hands.
If you ever used a touchscreen based phone, you know what I'm talking about. It's terrible to try to pull out the pen and mess with the contact lists and other UI when you're in a bus or subway packed with people.
On the other hand, it's not very optimal to type in calendar events or notes with just one hand, using the typical SMS text entry method.
Perhaps the best semi-solution is still the Nokia Communicator way, where an ordinary phone can be folded out into a laptop-like PDA with qwerty keyboard and all. Even then, one of the most requested features was to be able to type SMS messages _without_ folding it out, using just one hand in the phone mode.
Death? Isn't the murderer afraid that it may sue them?
Incidentally, I killed mine a few months ago when I bumped into the corner of a kitchen counter. It bled to death shortly thereafter in my right pants pocket.
To overcome your problem, they just need to add a speakerphone. Alot of phones have them now.
Smart phones, huh? Any of these guys been to Japan lately? It's shameful how behind we are in the US. Given the pace of development our companies are bringing in new cell phone technology, I don't see smartphones ever taking hold.
It's important to have perspective here. The Economist is based in London UK and has a decidedly UK/European perspective to it.
My point is that mobiles have taken off spectacularly in Europe (80% penetration), in fact, other articles in the Economist show that household fixed line penetration is reversing: people are dumping fixed lines because they have mobiles.
This means that from a US perspective (which slashdot is) with an expensive, non-standardised and low-penetration market (40%?) lacking the kind of choice in handsets available in Europe with the GSM standard, it may seem strange to suggest that PDA's are dead for mobiles.
However, in Europe, it's a different matter: the sheer critical mass and economies of scale of the mobile handset market make it ripe for overtaking PDA's.
It's only a matter of time before someone figures out that contact registers, generic phone/pda setup and profiles all will be stored online.
Phones and pda's will become terminal, online on the internet.
Then, why should you call someone through the telephone network, when they allready are online?
This future developement will be the one thing that kicks off IPv6.
#find
"The PDA is dead," says David Levin, the boss of Symbian, the leading maker of smartphone software.
In other news, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer came out and announced that Linux is dead.
#1 - Roll-up Displays
Kind of self explanatory....when you need a big screen, you roll this baby out, plug it in, and BAM, big screen.
#2 - Holographic Screens
Again, kind of self explanatory. Your screen projects from the device to a small distance away from it.....and can be expanded if you need it to.
#3 - Wearable Computing
This works kind of like the holographic one.....you can make the screen appear as big as you want, because it doesn't really exist. The other benefit is that others can't see what you're looking at. Expect this one to roll out the instant wearable computing becomes affordable/stylish.
These three technologies offer possibly the best hopes we have of ending the issue of the shrinking device/shrinking screen dilema, and they're almost all here.
P.S.
I'd love for someone to attempt to put this post into Spanish Inquisition form because I'm not familiar enough with the sketch to do it myself!
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Call me old-fashioned, but if everything (calendar, contacts, phone-numbers, etc.) is stored on one single device, loosing that device while on the road is disastrous.
I was actually thinking of replacing my Palm with my new cellphone, but said cellphone died on me while on the road (NEVER trust the standby times in the glossy papers!). Actually it's not a problem to find a phone booth, but it's 'Game Over' if you don't know the number you'll intend to call by heart, don't you think??
Checking the 'iSynced' Palm saved me that day.
Just something to think about.
Lots of people want a tiny phone and a separate PDA with large screen and built in keyboard.
Also, a lot of people want privacy. By the nature of the current (reasonably efficient) model, cell phones constantly send out a heartbeat signal. This allows tracking of a personal on a national scale easily. There is no native way to establish anonymous connections, so a history of all your calls is available. There is no support for end-to-end encryption (and significant federal opposition to such), so all your conversations can be monitored from the telco. Cell encryption to and from the telco's cell tower has had a long, ugly history of severe flaws (and in Europe, deliberate back doors in the form of key escrow). Finally, G3-class phones support a remote-turn-on feature without a visual "on" indicator (intended for law enforcement use) that allows remote eavesdropping.
Given these constraints (and the fact that I find it irritating to constantly be at the beck and call of others), I intensely dislike the idea of carrying a cell phone. Yes, you can turn them off, but then you're open to the question "why did you turn off your cell" and having people request that you keep yourself available.
Finally, there's the expense, the care you have to take not to damage them (I once was with a group of people that spontaneously decided to go swimming at the ocean and ended up destroying a number of cell phones), the hassle of understanding a compressed voice, the hassle of dealing with signal reception, the hassle of dealing with spam, the hassle of having an extra lump in your pocket, annoying people trying to sell you plans, the constant temptation to sign onto "services" rather than buying one-time products, etc, etc.
I realize that for some folks, there is really no option. If you're running a small consulting business, you may need to be available 24/7, and don't have an option to *not* be on-call and still be competitive.
VoIP may offer an eventual solution if someone develops a free decentralized VoIP network that catches on.
May we never see th
...has conquered the Greeks, but look at what they became - they took so much from their culture that in fact it was the Greeks who conquered the Romans - culturally.
So, maybe cellular phones will push PDAs from the market, but how? Just by becoming "PDAs with built in cellular phone" themselves. That's what they are starting to be now, just look at some models. Organisers, games, java, mp3, radio, bluetooth, calculator, calendar, www browsers... The phone itself is just a small add-on to that...
PDAs don't die. They just get renamed as "smart phones".
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I'm wondering. How long do you guys thing it will take before we get a smartphone/MP3 player integrated with an existing/flexible storage medium (flashcards?) so we can expand the storage to our own wishes/budget. Ohh what the heck, why don't we throw in a GPS system as well.
Many mobile phones (like my older Nokia) have modal dialogues which make it difficult to do other things while speaking.
See my journal, I write things there
The PDA market was heated up a lot by a lot of hype from Microsoft about their Pocket PC OS.
What happened was they came here to Taiwan and met with hardware OEM/ODMs and said look we're only going to license this to a few of you guys, but we guarantee this is the next big thing. You know, like the Tablet PC. A lot of local companies bought into it and some of the smaller ones leveraged everything they had to get in on the action.
I can't say for sure, but I suspect some of those guys that weren't diversified are hurting at this point. I do know that reports three years ago placed 2003 sales in the 100Million units. So much for prognostications.
So, the death of the PDA story is really about the failure of Microsoft's market planning efforts. Before the hype of the PocketPC OS, the PDA market was relatively stable. They really fueled the hype with what ended up being nothing but hot air.
It's interesting to consider that if a government technology office had made such a blunder there would be hell to pay because governments are accountable, but when a private corporation does the same thing it's just quietly forgotten because the whole affair was never the public's business to begin with --not even the shareholders. But despite the fact that it is all done quietly, the effects are still real. People lose their jobs, assets are wasted.
However a PDA doesn't usually have much stamina. It last three days or so with light use, and like the phone - it is usually running in a standby mode rather than being comeletely off. If you start to make much use of the PDA, the power consumption needed can drain the battery within a day (especially if its a Microsoft operating system). End result of combining the two is something that doesn't want to go to far from a charger.
See my journal, I write things there
"The PDA is dead," says David Levin, the boss of Symbian, the leading maker of smartphone software.
Yeah, kind of like the US Federal Reserve predicting the future of the Euro!
You aren't allowed to have a mobile phone switched on during flight. How then can you use its PDA functions then? Or play games on it?
The same two cent magazine was shouting to the world 'The Future belongs to dot com'. And so on. I wonder why people even bother to read such crap. After all it's all about a moron who gives a definitive answer. Alowing articles like this makes a magazine not worthy of reading in my oppinion.
After having a Danger hiptop, any PDA without a true (long distance + unmetered) wireless data connection is just a waste of time. My data connection is becoming metered soon, but the base usage allowed with the plan is about triple the max I've ever used.
On my hiptop I can ssh to my Unix accounts, from practically anywhere. Emacs is awesome on a hiptop. The fact that it is a phone is irrelevant. The more important thing is that it has a data connection.
Whenever I'm travelling, I always have important phone numbers and meetings on both phone and PDA.
And as far as convergence goes, I'd say it's not likely. I don't use my organiser too often, but I *never* use the oganiser on the phone.
I'd be more interested in an article that examined how many people use the organiser-like functions on their mobiles. I only got mine for the camera.
Warning: May contain nuts
This should have been predicted a long time ago. PDAs had to fail because their name is so stupid. People have always thought of Personal Digital Assitants as computerized address books and calendars. This is a short sighted way to look at devices that will one day be computers in our pockets. By limiting the devices name to a subset of its functions, the marketers in the US basically killed their future.
If the marketers had been smart enough, they would have promoted these devices as dumber but more portable computers. Something like:
or:They then should have made sure there was software to facilitate reading anywhere at any time. Imagine businessmen able to update there skills when they are on the train or the bus. I think many companies would have gone for that. Even downloading the morning's stock quotes and reading them from a handheld would have been much more recent than the quotes in the newspaper.
People might pay to have the convenience of the Internet in their pocket. No one is going to pay US$700 for an address and/or schedule book. Especially since the paper variety starts at a few dollars. By calling these devices PDAs, they have relegated them to competition with paper items cheaper than books (and PDAs are often harder to use as there is a learning curve).
Therefore, the term "PDA" is had doomed a whole set of innovative devices.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
They forget that majority of the cellphone users are people who just want to make a call and have no desire or ability to organise their lifestyle around a PDA-phone-mp3player type gizmo.
Wonder if they asked a carrier about their users calling patterns.. bet most of them would have said that a large number of their users use their phone primarily for short 1 minute type calls.
The Tungsten T3 has all the features of a handheld, and intergrates perfectly with my Sony Ericson T68i within 10 meters.
I wouldn't want one device that did both... the form factors just aren't compatible. What makes for a comfortable phone makes for a very limited PDA, and what makes for a comfortable PDA makes for a very uncomfortable phone.
Perfect integration with each other and my computer is what I want. And what I have. Thanks, PalmOne or whatever you're called now. :)
yet another thing pronounced dead on /. well before its time.
The PDA is not dead. It has simply evolved. Now can we all go back to real articles and stop pronouncing things dead?
-Cnik
the phone enabled pda will dig into the cell phone market. voip will grow giving wifi pda's the ability to make phone calls cheaper and without the monthly service fee since free wifi spots are popping up in "some" metro areas.
this transition won't happen for a while until more wifi points pop up.
"Everybody is forgetting the main cost... AIRTIME!"
:) I have a cell phone I use as a PDA and I pay $7 a month for the internet service (which can be funneled down to my PDA or laptop via bluetooth) but I don't pay actual air time.
Though your statement isn't wrong, it is a little misleading. Today the primary purpose of a PDA is for scheduling appointments and keeping contacts. Though the popularity of using a PDA for web browsing is on the rise, it's really not at a saturation point yet. Worse, the point of using your cell phone to get on the net is that 802.11 coverage isn't exactly ideal. So you get airtime charges (or just not use the net at all) when you're nowhere near an 802.11 hotspot. On top of that, the PDA phone I played with (I think it's made by Siemens or something like that) had an SD slot. There is a company who built an 802.11 card for that slot. If PDAs and cell phones merge more intimately, you can bet that 802.11 will be a serious consideration.
I think your other points (screen size, RAM, etc) are quite valid. I agrued in an earlier post in this thread that PDAs won't die because their slightly larger size affords them capabilities that a cell phone/PDA cannot accomdate. In other words, I agree with you. Just wanted to nitpick your airtime comment.
"Derp de derp."
PDA's have really failed to innovate -- their decline lay solely on their own hands.
For years they could have introduced mp3 playing, decent storage capacity, bluetooth, etc. But for whatever reason they held off as long as possible. Perhaps to keep margins high when they were shipping so many units it didn't matter what they did.
These days everyone carries a mobile phone and it just seems more logical to make the phone do the other things you want (address book, calendar, notes, games) rather than have to strap another device to your belt.
Between your iPod and Mobile phone - there's just no room left for the PDA.
--
Rare Window - free your photos
I think the whole PDA vs. phone argument is missing the point. Just like there was the old 'battle for the desktop', there will now be a new 'battle for the pocket' or purse or whatever. The point is that the human-wearable technologies are converging to a new standard configuration. This includes telephony, traditional PDA functions (calendar, task lists, address books, etc.), music and gaming in a portable, wearable, wireless package.
There are mobile phones in Europe that sell for as little as US $100 retail, without a subsidy (i.e. true hardware only price) - while they aren't currently smartphones, it shows that the mass market for phones enables this price point, and I'm sure that sub-$100 smartphones will arrive soon. There are already many 'basic' phones in Europe that have colour screens, GPRS, Java downloadable games, polyphonic ring tones, WAP browsers, etc - even very basic pay-as-you-go phones often have these features now (e.g. the Nokia 3510i).
At least in Europe you can buy GSM/GPRS phones as 'off net', i.e. you supply your own SIM card to actually use the phone.
Of course, if you don't want phone service on your PDA/smartphone you might as well get a PDA, and for the next year or two it may still be cheaper to buy a low end PDA, but the trend is quite clear.
Why?
Because I guarantee that 99% of PDA owners use their PDAs as PDAs. Now, how many smartphones are bought because of a fantastic To-Do List or a wide range of apps, hmmm?
Seriously, most people I know with smartphones use them as phones and maybe sync their contacts. My non-smart T610 does that and my iPaq 1940 happily talks to it. The people I know with PDAs use them daily and swear by them - they aren't just organisers though, you're looking at people playing games on them, listening to music etc. etc. The are more than PDAs, they're pocket computers.
I wonder how 11 million units per year does not equal "a mass market"?
[quote] annual sales have stayed flat at around 11m units worldwide. [ PCs = 130m, mobile phones = 460m units] "The PDA market will never be a mass market," says Cindy... [unquote]
I guess if you're not number one, you're just not in the game at all
Anyone have a canidate for the cheapest AIM + web browsing mobile device? (including a reasonably economical plan...)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
include mobile phone techonology on the hardware and software level. that and mobile VOIP telecommunications would gives pdas a great move.. because I have yet to see a "smart phone" that can do all that, pda's are one step ahead still.. and all they have to do is that and they can win the market back.. cell phones need to stay as phones.
bad enough people get into accidents on the freeway over just TALKING on cell phones, last thing we need is idiot mcgee going 90 mph down the freeway fiddling with some crap on his phone.
The newest generation of PDAs have cell phone
capabilities - they are called - smartphones.
This will eventually lead to the death of a normal
cell phone - they will be replaced by these PDAs
with games, notes etc.
The uptake here in Europe (and in Asia AFAIK) of mobile phones was very big and was certainly helped by the single GSM standard and almost blanket coverage from Malaga to Nordkap. (I've heard though that "plans" in the US are cheaper though). This meant that the number of mobile users is astronomical in Europe and that complete luddites are more than happy with their new phones that can take and send pictures, play songs and downloadable games and transfer addressbook and calendar items to one another.
/. want a pocketable light device that is fun and easy to use. They don't care whether it's Symbian, MS or Linux inside, or whether it has 64MB RAM or whatever.
None of them have heard of Bluetooth and even fewer care. Normal people i.e. those who don't read
There is three reasons why I have
cell phone + PDA and not smartphone:
1. price: phone was $15, PDA(sharp Zaurus) $180.
smartphones start at $500
2. No smartphones run Linux - Z does
3. Battery life of my cell is 8 days,
PDA (and smartphone as well I guess) has to be charged daily.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I've had my Kyrocera Smartphone (Palm powered) for over a year now. I've been wanting a colored version for some time now, but Sprint has yet to release one with the features I want.
I refuse to buy a PDA without phone service built in. There is no way I'll go back.
Look, aside from price problems (see above), there are more practical ones. The more "stuff" a cell phone can do the complicated it gets. For me, the screen size that I need to be functional would make for a shitty cell phone. Even those that are PDA/Phones now are very big. What is wrong with keeping them separate? At least until video capability comes along. Holding a brick to your head is just not convenient, IMHO. JAV
Is a networked handheld browser. I can keep all my data (contacts, calendar, mp3s, etc.) on a server that I can access from any device. This way I don't have to do any device sync'ing or backups. The browser is just a window into applications running on real computer somewhere else. This depends on having always available high bandwidth connections. It may take while. Of course this will never happen in a computer industry that is dominated by local storage based machines from windows. I really miss the days where I could walk up to any computer in the office, login and it basically became my machine.
I know of several carriers that won't let you use the combo units in flight, even if you've turned off the phone feature. This might change with greater acceptance, though.
http://www.timmorgan.com
First off NO GAMES!!!...NO CUTESY DOWNLOADABLE BATTERY/MONEY WASTING CRAP!!!....I WANT A BUSINESS TOOL NOT A TOY!!!! ..ooohh, that was cathartic....I feel better now...what was I talking about? Oh yes, my perfect phone...
.
.
Second: Manage my communications, that means a generous address book that can be categorized based on personal contacts, coworkers, customers, goverment contacts, secret Nevada test site, etc. Give me reliable phone capabilities along with text messaging and, keep a copy of my e-mail messages for when I'm away from my laptop. In a pinch, it would be useful to check e-mail but that is not the highest priority as any business e-mail I get would very likely require me to get to my computer anyway.
Third: Be my organizer. Calander, To-Do list, appointments, pocket watch, that kind of stuff.
Fourth: Act like a USB or Smart Media drive to give me an easy way to transfer files between my office and home computers. I suppose some marketing guy will assume MP3 player as well, but I'll never use it. I'd rather have the battery life and purchase a separate dedicated MP3 player.
Fifth: Camera abilities - It would be nice if I could say, stick this thing in the belly of a Boeing 737 and document the progress of an airframe modification or something like that. It doesn't have to be a great camera, but it does have to work in a variety of conditions so focus and flash is a plus.
Sixth: Webcam - my only indulgence, it would be nice to call my family from the road and be able to use my camera as a webcam while they used Gnomemeeting or some equivalent.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
MOST Smartphones have touch screens. The ones without touch screens are the exceptions. Please mod this comment down quickly.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Having friends who have these sort of devices and also seeing the Handspring Treo, I feel that they are usually too big as a phone or too small as a PDA. I don't doubt that one day a PDA-Phone will come out at the manages to solve the size issue correctly, but I am yet to see something that does.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
A Palm isn't a half-assed PDA. Its the standard of PDA's. Should another PDA maker live up to its features and price point that would actually be a good thing.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
the product isn't going to -die-. this is how convergence devices are -born-.
PDA market growth is just going to come in the form of convergence devices more and more. some consumers will see it as new phone tech on their next PDA, most will see it as new PDA tech on their next phone. but neither product will 'die'. dedicated PDAs will simply be relegated to markets where having phone capability isn't worth the cost.
in the same reactionary vein one could argue that mp3 players are going to 'die' because of the proliferation of that core functionality showing up in PDAs and cellphones. (without near killer-app sized storage though).
i think the obvious explanation is consumers are demanding a single 'thing' that is their interface to mobile digital information. be it 3G phone, PIM, mp3, email, or mobile data storage. then there's society: having a cellphone is not 'geeky', nor is having a cellphone with PIM functionality.
but having a cellphone + mp3 player + PDA certainly still is.
and practicality: having to manage the batteries on 3+ digital devices is a headache. particularly when you are generally using only one or the other.
my ideal convergence device:
embedded Linux-based OS (for custom programming)
full bandwidth 3G phone (w/ 1m CCD, 24fps video capability)
CF type2 slot
built-in WiFi (802.11b is fine)
short range FM transmitter (for car usage without a dongle)
built in HD ~6gB (preferrably magneto-SRAM)
usb2.0/firewire
OSS PIM
mp3 audio software
mp4/divx video software
tabletPC-style graffiti interface, with automatic translation for text-boxes would be good too.
no more hunt and stab with the stylus for url input.
no SD, no MemoryStick -- no DRM at all thank-you-very-much.
battery: li-ion, rechargable via usb/firewire/dc adapter. ~10 hrs running time.
size: about 4"x2.5".
attachable secondary battery, camelback style, for long trips/flights would be great too.
right now one pays:
~$275 for the mp3 player and storage
~$150 for basic PDA
~$175 for a capable 3G phone
would i pay $600 for all of this rolled into one? most certainly. hell i already spent $200 on the pda and $140 on a nex2e and 512mb CF card. if i get a decent cameraphone i'm out another $150 at least. then there was another $50 for the wifi adapter for the pda.
to be able to have all that functionality in one widget is worth at least $150 by itself. particularly if it has respectable battery life.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
What college do you go to that people are too poor to be able to afford the low end $79-$120 PDAs?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
don't need graphing for field calculations, but something on par with my old HP would be great.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Don't you mean that this is the death of the cell phone?
The functionality of a cell phone is so small compared with todays mobile computer devices.
The simple cellphone capability is being absorbed into SmartPhones, Palms, and PocketPCs.
Cell Phones are dying, not PDAs. Duh!
I'd say the only thing my PDA is useful for is playing MP3's. Other than that I get better results with a pocket-sized, paper, calendar thingy. It never runs out of batteries, if I lose it it's cheap to replace, I can sit on it and not break it, it cost $1.49 in the first place. Yeah, I can't play freecell. I don't care.
Vote Quimby!
This is the major reason I went with T-Mobile. They charge $20/month to add unlimited data to any of their voice plans. Alternatively, for $30/month you get a plan with unlimited data but no included phone minutes, intended for those who plan to use their device only for data and use a different phone for voice. I see a dwindling market for non-connected PDAs. The ability to make a network connection, whether via cellular or 802.11, is quite attractive. I've read Slashdot via my Sidekick while waiting for my meal at a restaurant, for instance.
End of Line.
Dying?? It can't die yet! I haven't gotten mine yet. ARGHHHH! I hate it when tech dies before I get a slice.
Blog,Twitter
Until they get a smartphone with every feature of the Palm Tungsten C -- including, in fact ESPECIALLY INCLUDING WiFi -- there is no reason for me to cease my current configuration: The aforementioned TC and a cheap Nokia with no PDAish features beyond a stripped-down version of my phone book. As is, if my PDA battery goes out, it's back to post-its or the little grey cells until I get home; my cell phone still works and I don't have that inconvenience as well. The closest smartphone to what I'd need to be able to use it in exclusivity of my preexisting mobile hardware is probably the Palm Tungsten W, but its PDA workings are frankly aged for the price: Palm OS 4 and a Dragonball. I imagine this is for power conservation, but you are STILL running your palm pilot off the battery of your phone. Wait, there's the new Handspring Treo 600. Still no WiFi though.
Well, I can see we've got a tough audiance for this one so I'll continue as an AC to avoid being punished for speaking out against the overlords, but this is a true story.
The Pocket PC is a special case where software really crosses over into hardware. The PC hardware standard isn't something that MS can dictate. But in the case of the the PocketPC, it wasn't just a piece of software, it was also a hardware spec being dictated by a software monopoly. If you didn't play by their rules, you didn't play. This is simply a fact.
I think it's important to call attention to the fact that there were real damages. People are being laid off and demoted left and right in the companies that agreed to go along with this and it was done on a whim. It was essentially a dictate.
So, perhaps some mod out there thinks the post if flamebait, but I think some real human beings out there who lost their jobs and lost assets that are feeling like they were sold out by a huge monopoly player that essentially lied to them on a dictatorial whim.
Yeah, it's controversial to suggest that the so-called free markets can be as dictatorial, wasteful and backwards as a socialist state, but it's worth pointing out the examples of where the dogma fails and it's being swept under the rug.
...then I'm just going to have to seek out "smart phones" without voice capability. I hope there'll always be a niche for those. Damn I hate people phoning me!
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
It is unknown whether it is the microwave radiation, the HF of the cpu clock, or maybe the LCD screen, but the irresistable urge to fist oneself anally with handheld electronic devices comes predictably to all users of such devices eventually. Maybe it is some bioelectric phenonmenon, maybe it is aliens.
More likely people who carry PDAs/SmartPhones are so anal that their mind has already sunk to that level of depravity by the time of purchase.
The powerful homoerotic imagery of a Smartphone in their hand inspires irresistable storms of desire culminating in a trip to the emergency room to have their abdomen's X-Rayed ( incidentally wiping out all data on their device ), and the device removed from their colon using Jiffy Lube.
None of them ever ran *BSD
/me dons asbestos suit
The previous sig has been removed due to
You may have gathered here that I hate the perpetuation of the "Victorian" QWERTY layout into this modern age...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
One of the problems that the PDA market has had for some time now is that the old ones are sufficent, so there's no need for people to get new ones. I'm still using my Visor Deluxe from years ago, because it serves my purposes (remind me to go to the dentist in 15 minutes, hold on to directions to the dentist, keep phone numbers, display e-books on occasion, and play a couple of silly games). It would be nice if it could recharge batteries in a cradle, but that's the only thing I'm really missing.
So the PDA market is largely doomed because everyone who wants one has one, and not that many people want to get new ones for the toy factor; combining with cell phones, on the other hand, reduces the number of devices people carry, so that's a worthwhile reason to buy a new device.
In any case, I expect PDAs to be used long after it becomes commercially infeasible to make a big deal about selling them. "Death" is the wrong term here; a better term might be "infertility".
Drill baby drill - on Mars
The Sidekick has no airtime charges for internet activities. As a matter of fact, it's connected to the internet 24/7.
Only off-hand disadvantages to it are that it's a big-sized device compared to most phones/pdas (though smaller than the sum of the two in most cases), and development has been kind of slow for it considering it has gone nearly a year without any significant upgrades. They just came out with a color version, but I have not yet evaluated it myself.
The persistent internet connection is cool. I was importing a bunch of contact info using my home computer, through the web interface to my sidekick's data store, and as I added each contact, I could look at my SK's screen and see the entry show up in the list within seconds of submitting the new contact form on my desktop computer.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
PDAs and SmartPhones have diferent purposes, diferent interface aproaches, and will probably coexist for a long time. Someone who switches a PDA for a SmartPhone probably didn't need a PDA at all, but a more sofisticated Phone/Organizer. I only hope that SmartPhones will force PDA manufacturers to lower the prices.
Some people only use their PDA for appointments, contacts, some notes and maybe a handful of family photos, plus they typically carry their devices in their hands or maybe a pocket. These people want a PDA/Phone unit, perhaps a bit bigger than their current phone, but smaller than their current PDA.
I on the other hand travel with a backpack and what I want is a basically dumb phone - phone numbers and SMS - but I want a smart PDA since to me a digital assistant is far more than a diary/calendar/phone book replacement - I carry around databases, screenshots, price lists among other things. A laptop however goes too far, will often take up too much space and is more easily damaged - for me, and in most circumstances. I also like a basic, separate phone because there are times when all I need with me is a small, fairly robust device from which I can make a call if I really need to - I like my Nokia 6210 and 6310 (admittedly these have far more features than I have ever used, but I like the size and shape).
I'd consider a phone device that could send/receive SMS messages and store a very limited number of phone numbers, but could pair with a full-featured PDA - perhaps turning simply into a dumb headset when linked.
Isn't it always going to be the case that something the size of a typical PDA can contain more than something the size of a phone? I think all we're seeing is some more overlaps and a broader range of possible devices that will allow people to find something closer to what they require.
Video Killed The Radio Star
I have a PDA and a seperate cell phone. The cell phone is supplied by the company I work for.
But the PDA is the big issue. I use a Handspring, because of the external modules for it. One of those external modules is the "killer ap" for me. Module one is the blood glucose meter. That make the PDA a medical device, and allowed my medical insurance to pay for it.
I added a GPS module, a compactflashcard interface module, a backup module, a dictionary module, and a 5 language translation module. I also had a custom cable made for downloading data from my dive computer. Many other modules exist, but these are the ones I went for.
So, would one of these hybrid PDA / Phones work for me. Nope. Because the people that make the new phones aren't interested in the extension by module.
I have never found PDAs to be that useful by themselves. Most mobile phone interfaces are limited and don't provide all the functionality a PDA does, merging the two makes perfect sense. Now only if it were as powerful as my ibook..
The next step is to defy the bounds of physics by making the smart phone small, but still have a large, clear display (holograms!). Or, I would be satisfied with a small built in screen and a connector for a regular sized high res monitor. Eventually a phone sized computer could replace all the functions and power of a laptop, but be that much smaller. Give it 3-5 years. Smart phones will have 2.5 ghz Transmeta chips.
TallGreen CMS hosting
When i first saw a palmpilot i thought YES that is the shape of a PDA and it has been eversince. Just like the pads on star-trek its the perfect form and style.
But then the beauty of the phone is that its an all in one - even older phones have atleast a calender and its just one thing to keep hold of.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
But what weare talking about is not really the death the PDA, but a re-definition of the PDA.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Bluetooth is not dead. The PDA is not dead. (Fill in the blank) is not dead. The Apple IIC can (maybe ) be declared dead. Dinosaurs=dead. I am sick of these people trying to be different and "smart" by declaring stuff "dead" that has not really even seen their best days, IMHO. Between this and Star Wars toys sex lives, I do not know which is worse.
I hate sigs.
PDA's are not dead, not by a long shot. The recent palm-phone combinations that came out recently are huge, and hardly convenient to carry around comfortably, even the new SprintPCS samsung model. It looks great, but just way to big to be effective or ergonomic.
The PDA/Phone will rule when the combination of both will no longer mean you get a crappy phone combined with a crappy PDA in a shoe-size form factor.
AND yes, I am speaking from experience, having lugged around the Samsung SPH-I500, the "next generation" palm phone, which was too big to be a phone and too slow/outdated to be a pda, combined with a battery that lasted no longer than 24h.
Cheers,
0x41
Two days ago I got my new Sony Ericsson T616 cell phone. It's got games, an organizer, a calculator--everything that my Sony Clie that's a year and a half old can do. However, I am nowhere near putting the Clie away for good because of one simple thing:
Money
Everything on cell phones cost. It costs to use wireless Internet, it costs to download ringtones, it costs to get new games.
My Clie, on the other hand, can access my college's wireless network (if I had a wireless card), download any sound file I want, and play any games I'm willing to spend the time to download (okay, the Quake II port is still WinCE, last I checked).
Other than the initial cost (which was quite a burden at $400; but, the cell phone without a contract was the same!) and the costs of the accessories (mp3 adapter, wireless card: T616 has integrated Bluetooth), my Clie definitely wins out. Until cell phone companies bring short or nonexistant contracts to the table and free extras, PDAs will never die.
I like my 8 bit Psion Model LZ. :)
(Bought new mid 90's and still goin' strong.)
Built like a brick s**t house.
3-4 Month Battery life.
Retro charm
But i've yet to find anything as flexible as a
cheap notebook and pencil. The pencil is even compatible
with the back of an old envelope, coupled with my
Concise No 28 circular slide rule, i'm sorted.
As to fones. I've had a Nokia 6210e for ages. It works for me.
siggy played guitar
or so I've heard.
Yessum massah. Youse be de boss. Ise bowing befor 'd massah. Pleze don be hitting me massah.
Just acquired a Sidekick via T-Mobile.
/., and pull up a pdf or .doc if I need it to. That's pretty much all I need from something I put in a pocket. The new OS update will do audio files (at least .aiff, .wav. .rmf, and midi.) and gives it unicode, as well as a few other tweaks like a "forward" button on the browser. It's little, it's handy, and it's useful. It officially doesn't suck.
I approve.
It functions reasonably well as a phone, isn't uncomfortable to use, and so far hasn't demonstrated any reception trouble or battery life issues. Data/PDA functionality is smooth, barring the lack of sync ability, however that is apparently forthcoming. The usefulness of things like an SSH application (forthcoming, they're doing OS updates right now.) goes without saying.
The plan is indeed $20 for unlimited data, and at least in the Seattle area the GPRS coverage is fairly seamless. ($30 no voice, but to my mind it's far more worth it to spring for a minimal plan and get a decent amount of minutes. I think I'm running ballpark 50-60 a month for more minutes than I use and all the GPRS I can handle.) I recommend it, highly.
Now, I WILL note that it's not a perfect device. The placement of the screen leaves a bit to be desired--I'd much prefer a clamshell or some form of cover over the screen. Belt-packs are bulky, and I'm uncomfortable just chucking it in a pocket sans a guard over the LCD. I keep getting earprints on the screen while talking on the phone, but if I could be bothered to find the headset it comes with, that'd not be a problem. It also needs a pipe key.
On the whole, however, it's a decent melding of lightweight PDA and phone. Sure, no excel, etc, but it'll check my email, get me to
--D
if these devices merge, i sure as hell do not want to be typing on those '12345...' phone keyboards. some of us DO use them for more than talk and music.
... or is it here here?
I tend to agree with Namarrgon as far as usefulness. My phone does what it should do: call and receive, and hold phone numbers. For something requiring any semblance of computing power on the go I have an ancient ThinkPad with a 12" screen. However, I don't think we've seen the "end of the PDA." The only thing this article mentions is that sales are flat--not flat-lined. Washer and dryer sales are flat but there is still a real market for them. When sales become near non-existant then the trumpets can blow the "death of the PDA market." Since PDA's have the capability to be upgraded with new technologies down the road, they have potential.
Although, I don't see myself buying one (unless it can replace my laptop), I wouldn't count them out.
MY Samsung I330 is a great PDA AND a great phone.
I'll give you one good reason for the combo: Integrated dialing from the same address book. Also, it has the ability to be held to your head, use a headset, or use the SPEAKERPHONE. Never mind the fact that carrying 2 devices is a royal PITA.
Lasts 2 days on the small battery, a week on the big one, and I use it contantly. With Sprint PCS Business Connection it even trumps Blackberry, giving me notifications wehn I get new mail, full access to the mail server, and the ability to view attachments and attach files from my PC to outgoing mails.