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Death of the PDA?

Posted by michael on from the not-likely dept.

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."

2 of 435 comments (clear)

  1. PDA by OneArmedMan · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    PDA's like BSD are dying!

  2. Microsoft's role in the Pocket PC is worth noting by ahfoo · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    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.