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Are PDAs Simply Finished?
angkor writes "After Sony's sudden plan to discontinue the Clie and pull out of the American PDA market, many industry observers have increased their speculation about the demise of the PDA, in general. The Japanese electronics giant was defeated in the American market by increased competition and an industry-wide decline in PDA sales."
Most people I know already have a PDA and have no plans to buy a new one since their current one does what they want. Its not that people no longer use PDAs, its that people aren't compelled to upgrade to a newer model since it offers nothing new for them.
The problem is that Mobiles cost money for just about everything you do on them - it can be hard to keep track which options are free and which ones cost 0.17c per click.
They deliberately make it confusing so that the average Joe gets screwed into spending more money than s/he should.
Unless the mobile companies make it completely clear (and permanent) that you can access all your info free - forever, with no hidden catches (including running out of credit / switching providers, etc) - then there will always be a market for PDA's for people who just want access to their data without worrying about paying for the privelage to get it.
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
No, PDA's are not finished, but I hope they will take their proper place as an INEXPENSIVE replacement for a day-timer style notebook and stop trying to be a replacement for a PC. I don't want to spend $200, much less $600 on something that is so easily lost, stolen or dropped. People who do are either gadget freaks, or are spending someone else's money. Of course, if you work for a company so overburdened by cash that they give you a desktop PC AND a laptop AND a $600 PDA you'd be foolish not to take it, but for the rest of us a sub $100 device is more than adequate. I'd really like to have the thing I carry around cost more like $50 or less so that I could be even more careless with it than I already am.
Sony is wise to exit a market that is oversaturated as is. Let Microsoft and Palm fight over what is left. My guess is that eventually most people will be carrying around something from Casio because the price is right and the functionality is good enough. Palm and Microsoft will lose money fighting over the "road-warriors" which will ultimately lead to Palm going under followed by Microsoft losing interest. A fitting end to the insanity.
Because of Moore's law, the gap between PDA and phone has narrowed to the extent that there really isn't one in terms of computing power.
What then, is the difference between a phone and a PDA? Apart from the telephony aspect, the only significant difference is one that will endure - the screen size. When is that significant?
Phones have a maximum screen size of 2 inches. This isn't likely to expand because that's the limit of most peoples pockets, and phones will always have to fit in pockets. PDA's like iPAQ have a screen size of 3.5 inches. When it comes to document and map viewing, that's a lot more than a phone.
PDAs will continue to exist to the extent that map and document viewing proliferates - at least, to the extent that mobile mapping and document viewing applications proliferate that require 3.5 inch displays.
I think the major reason "PDAs" are dying is because virtually every cellphone on sale these days has most of the functionality PDAs are generally used for, with the exception of efficient note taking (a feature I rarely see my PDA-owning friends using in practice)
I quoted "PDAs" in the above because in a sense, that means that cellphones are the next generation PDAs, a device you keep in your pocket, that stores your contacts, calendar, and general notes, can perform calculations, let you play games when you're bored, etc - that happens to incorporate an additional function PDAs never had, the ability to contact anyone in the world - by message or voice - in seconds.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Palm is so fucked up right now they don't know the time of day. It kinda reminds me of Apple just when Jobs came back. They have seven models with overlapping features and limit flexability. They need to cut back to three models:
The Tungsten E, priced at $150 and has comes with a universal connecter and has the ability to add in a bluetooth SD card and thumb board. Think of it as the iBook of PDAs. Make it durable and market it to students and first time PDA buyers. Right now Palm's entry level PDA, the Zire 21, is the biggest piece of shit ever dreamed of. It doesn't even have a backlit screen, something they fail to mention anywhere on their website or packaging. Way to piss off the buyer. In contrast the Tungsten E is a very nice little machine (flawed but nice).
The Tungsten C but with the sliding screen of the T3, snap in bluetooth or 802.11x. Think of it as the PowerBook of PDAs
The Treo 600. One crossover phone/pda model.
Palm needs to develope something like Hypercard (the orignal where everyone could build stacks) or buy hypercard from Apple and give it away with every unit they sell. A lot of HC stacks sucked but it created a lot of buzz for the Mac. I make a lot of references to Apple because Jobs (who is a miserable human being) took Apple off it's death bed and turned it into a cash cow. Do they control the PC world? No way. Do they need to? No way. Palm needs to think different.
As for the PocketPC, if they win the PDA wars it will be by default. Palm has the potential of being much better if they can "unfuck" themselves. Don't blame declining PDA sales on the concept of the PDA when the management of these companies are to blame.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
I've always tried my best to keep personal treasures under a certain price if the following could be applied to them:
:)
A) I could break it by sitting on it with my massive ass
B) Lose it
C) Someone would be willing to steal it off my person due to it's value.
So I never wanted to risk spending betweeen $200-800 on a PDA in fear that one of the above would happen.
Well eventually a few models would drop down to 129$, and I bought a discontinued Sony Clie. Really cool little gadget. It was cheap, but had practical features. Built-in lithium ion battery with 60+ hours of charge, a simple black and white screen with a indiglo backlight, scroll wheel. I got a lot of use out of the little creature.
Eventually B) happened, I lost it. Was not the end of the world cause it was at a price point I was willing to deal with A, B or C happening to.
So I go out to find me a replacement, at the time, everything had color screens, cameras, mp3 players, etc. All really cool stuff, but it jacked the price up out of my reach.
Then you had the Palm Zire series, certainly cheap. But it had none of the practical features I relied on.
I think we're all attracted to cool, but I'm willing to bet that most people crave cool but buy what they can get by with and afford.
I know Ford sells more cars than Porsche partly cause of this
I think partly this is why the PDA market is drying up, for me, I feel they are pricing themselves out of reach. For people that feel the same as myself, that they're too expensive to risk losing/breaking/having stolen, rather do without than the risk.
Unfortunate, I really liked Monopoly for Palm.
People want either highly specialized mini computers (ie audio players), or they want the full power of a computer.
I think this is how the PDA lost its edge. It *used* to be an inexpensive, specialized satellite device. Then feature creep came in and everyone wanted more memory, bigger screens, full color support, sound, graphics, wireless, etc., etc. If Palm started selling something akin to the original device, but at a much lower cost (say $25-$50), they would probably see sales pick up.
The problem is that such a device would invalidate the tremendous library of existing software. Thus they need less of a true Palm Pilot and more of a new "mini-Palm" platform for the "cost-conscious". I myself love my Sony CLIE and am sad to hear of their demise, but I also bought mine on sale for $130. There's no way I'm going to spend $300-$500 on something I might lose. Not to mention the fact that my occasional (albeit useful) usage doesn't justify a high price tag.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
PDAs have saturated the market for users willing to dedicate a substantial amount of effort to overcoming their usability issues. This is a market ripe for Apple to pick up, because the market of casual users is still untapped.
Someone else already related how when the battery goes, today's PDAs reset themselves. Glaring usability issue for casual users. I've heard this same complaint from my non-technical friends who tried a PDA, then ditched them in favor of paper and pen. When you are trying to woo people away from an intimate routine in their daily life, at first it is sufficient to offer something that addresses the needs of people trying to solve scalability problems with their routines, like the consultant in this thread who has hundreds of contacts they have to keep up with on a monthly basis, or the poster in the healthcare field who needs to tote around a small cart of books in their hands. The PDA companies have been selling into business users for the most part, and to continue their growth they have to crack the casual user market.
Business users tend to be willing to put up with a lot that casual users will not. If a business user perceives that they obtain an edge with a particular product or service, they will invest the effort necessary to overcome the idiosyncracies to achieve that edge. Casual users will not, because the product or service is less integral to the happiness of their lives.
That you have to purchase third party applications before you can obtain seamless linking between your day timer and address book drives up the barrier to adoption by casual users. This is what leads to the perception that PDAs are nothing more than DayTimers for gadget freaks. In their default, out of the box configuration, they merely transfer the manual activities of a DayTimer onto an electronic system. That's like asking a company to adopt a computerized accounting system, only to have an army of clerks still manually reconcile accounts instead of hooking into an OFX interface.
Just shrinking the form factor and the price misses the entire point of trying to capture the casual user market.
More than ten years on after the introduction of the original Apple Newton MessagePad, I'm still surprised that neither Palm nor Microsoft have adopted the soups and slots style architecture of the NewtonOS. Today, RDF and XML could be used to implement a similar data presentation architecture, making it more useful outside of the PDA as well. More important than the technical contributions of the Newton however, were some of the marketing insights that were associated with the technical implementation.
The realization by the Newton team that most PDA applications would be relatively Unix-like (small, purpose-built applications) was spot on. The key marketing insight was that for a thriving user base and developer base to grow up around the platform, it had to be technically feasible to organically mold the user experience. It had to be easy and seamless to add functionality for example, to the out of the box address book. Or if you had to replace the address book with a more powerful address book implemented in a completely different way, it had to be easy for other developers to access the new data fields the new address book supports.
Today on PalmOS, there is one-way sharing of data fields. Address and date book replacements (the only way to extend functionality of the built-in applications is to replace them wholesale) can manipulate the built-in data fields, but it requires a separate contract negotiation with the individual developer of the new application (or reverse engineering) to obtain the formats for the additional data fields so that you could use it in yet another application.
The network effects of applications and more importantly
One reason I like my PDA (and as I'm sure others will point out) is that I can use it as a portable library of e-books. Plus, being able to play a game of solitaire while sitting on the crapper is a big plus (just don't tell anyone you're going to the toilet for some solitaire!)
But the main reason I have for keeping it seperate from my phone (besides screen size) is this: I DON'T HAVE TO PAY A MONTHLY FEE TO USE MY PDA!
Why does it seem that more devices like this which can be purchased once and used without a monthly charge are being edged out by cheap, tatty phones and the like that require service agreements? Who the hell NEEDS a phone with a million features (PDA, camera, video mail, etc) when all one really needs is a phone that lets you place and receive calls?
Non tam praeclarum est scire Latine, quam turpe nescire
-- Cicero
Year ago I got a second hand iPaq 3970 for 1/3 of retail price just for the fun to put linux onto it. I would never pay a full price for it, no matter how cute device it is.
So, I guess when PDA maker will price them 3-5 times less, they would have no problems to penetrate the market.
Yes, of course, WinCE sucks, too. It's clear people have no use for PDA without any usefull software. That's a moment where platform portability of F/OSS really does count.
With linux I can run almost anything what exists on big machines. I have even a tiny web server and SQL engine running on my iPaq for demonstration. Perfect linux propaganda to impress corporate nuts who are only able to sync their outlook calendar with the same model but running PocketPC.
There you are, staring at me again.
They do. The Palm Zire 21 is sold at Wal-Mart in a blister pack for $80 It has all the functionality of a old Palm 5. But that also brings up another point. I know alot of people at work that still use Palm 5 & 7s. They were built to last and so the market for replacements is slow. Alot of people are happy with older devices. I sold a friend my old Palm 3x because my son no longer wanted it after I gave him my old Paml M105. My current Palm is the Tungsten E ($180) and it does everything I need it to. I do also have a new Dell Inspiron 5150 gaming laptop, at 9Lbs it does not fit in my pocket the way a Palm does 8^)
Science is the Real TRUTH!
nope... not the answer...
My origional PAlm Pilot. was in heavy use until I replaced it with a Sharp Zaurus.. most peopl that use palm devices are very happy with their unit for years, which is a Deathwish for any electronics manufacturer.. the PAlm PDA was too good. it worked, the apps did not take 90Meg of space and a 4 meg palm pilot could be used quite well by even a power user and have room for gobs of data plus books in it.
The same can NOT be said about any other PDA.
I am sitting here with a almost worn out sharp SL5500 looking to replace it with the new 6000 upgrade... but yet my palm III from over 4 years ago is still doing it's job nicely, works great, the battery pack does not fade (AAA batteries are cheap and better than any LiIon battery made.) and it's doing things my GF thoughh you needed to buy a new PDA for.
PalmOS is the killer Pocket OS... it doesn't obsolete the hardware at every version... and that is the problem.
Thre last Clie from SONY is the ultimate Palm Pilot, and people that buy them dont go upgrading every year as they dont need to.
and that is the problem.... if your product doesnt hook the customer into the "upgrade" cycle then you are doomed.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Here is why:
I keep my PDA and phone synced to my pc and to eachother using bluetooth, so I take my notes and appointments once, and have them everywhere even if I only carry my phone around.. I do end up taking my PDA with me as well tho most of the time.. its small and light enough to just fit in the pocket of a shirt.
Since my phone doesn't have to have a as big as possible screen or even color, it can me sxtremely small and have a very low energy usage, resulting in being able to carry it around for a logn time without charging.
So well, by not wanting phone functionality from my pda, and only wanting very limited pda functionality from my phone, I end up with 2 small and light devices. I can always carry my appointments and such with me in a small and light phone, and it is little bother to take a pda with me as well since it is also light and small. Since they have a wireless link I can still browse the internet and do mail on my pda, and do so with a nice well readable screen and something more comfortable then a phone keyboard.
It's kindof funny, neither my pda or phone is new, both are over 2 years old actually, but the combination ends up being very usable, and as it is, I often end up reading slashdot during my regular 5 hours long trips to Berlin by train, only depending on the availability of the cellular network, but with a repeater in the train itself that is not a problem.. and knowign that by the tiem I get there the batteries of my PDA will be somewhat drained, but my phoen will have enough power to last another week :)