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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."
Exactly - and the real problems will occur when it comes to net/email access.
There are what, 3-4 different ways this can happen through a PDA/Phone at the moment - and using a PDA, you can be sure you are using a non $/sec method, but with a phone it gets blurry.
"Sorry, sir but when you checked your email at 4:14pm this was at our 'peak rate' and you now owe us lots of dollars."
"But I thought I was using the Wifi access through the coffee shop"
"No sir, that only occurs on every second Wednesday - please pay the $14.50 fee or we will disconnect you."
I know - its just little fees and I should just pay it - but I don't like getting tricked into these fucking schemes which are more and more prevalent these days from the big companies.
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
Well, it depends. I owned a Visor, one Clie, Tungsten C and now I have a Zaurus C760. I have also cell phone which has some rudimentary PDA functions (calendar, notes, addressbook). It all comes down to what you want to use the device for.
If you need just to keep track of phone numbers and occassional appointment, then probably a PDA is an overkill for you. The same if you expect a PC-like functionality from it. It was just not intended for that use.
However, if you need an ultra-portable device, which is capable of decent networking (there are no cell phones with WiFi and data connections via e.g. GPRS are very slow and for exorbitant prices.), has usable screen for data entry and a bit of computing power to handle e.g. VPN, decent mail client and web browser, then probably a cell phone is not going to cut it. Also I want my cell phone small, not a huge brick it would have to be if the manufacturer wanted to accomodate large screen usable for PDA functions. Just look at the Treo smartphones, they are very big for a phone and the screens are still the good old crappy 160x160 Palm resolution (not sure about the recent 600 Treo). And Treos are probably the best PDA-phone combination (or smartphone if you want) that there is on the market today.
Compared to laptops, yeah, laptop is more powerful than any PDA, that's true. However, my Visor ran on one set of AAA batteries for two weeks with normal use and over 12 hours with intensive use in a day long meeting entering data via external keyboard. Even the most recent Centrino laptops have problems to last that long. Not to mention the portability - I am carrying my Zaurus all the time with me, my T41 Thinkpad has 2.5kg, which do not count as a brick yet, but are not something pleasant to constantly lug around neither.
Finally, usage patterns - with PDA, you can just whip it out, power it up, look up some phone number or whatever and turn it off again in seconds. That's about the time you manage to type something on your cell phone fighting with the clumsy interface or your laptop starts to be usable after waking up from suspend.
So, I do not think that because Sony exited the market with their horribly overpriced and often flaky PDAs, which refused to support e.g. Compact Flash because it would undercut the sales of their expensive Memorysticks (even in the NZ line, which had the slot for that - the slot can be used only for their proprietary and very expensive WiFi card), the whole market is going down the drain. There is a saturation in the market and little compeling reason to buy a new PDA if your old one still works fine. The amount of innovation brought by Palm, Sony and HP (iPaqs ..) is abysmal in recent years, so no wonder that people do not buy. The largest peeves of the current PDAs - decent keyboard, decent display (Psion anybody?) and finally stable OS (yeah, both PalmOS and WinCE suck here) are still missing. Sharp is on good track with their C7xx line here, however the software leaves a lot to be desired and in the marketing department Sharp is shooting itself in the foot, IMHO. Fortunately, there is plenty of excelent free software for Zaurus available.
Calling PDAs fad which is dying out is at least bit premature, IMHO. If you have no use for it, do not buy one. For me it was a tremendous help, regardless of having a laptop and cell phone already. I like devices that take the "UNIX approach" - do just one thing and do it well. Laptop and cell phone do not do PDA role well, so why to push them there.
Regards, Jan
Actually, the same reason why our cell phones suck here compared to Japan is why it makes no difference whether you use an American cell phone or a PDA. The designed in software is crippled. Why on earth are modern PDA's still using WML or XHTML browsers when there are perfectly capable industry standard browsers that will run inside of them. NTT DoCoMo's phones were my reason for not owning a PDA in Japan because they had a hoard of web sites out there that did everything I needed to do. I could actually even reserve concert or plane tickets right from my phone's i-Mode browser. Try going to a website on the Blackberry....just plain sucks and almost no-one develops for it. Pocket-PC...miles better, but scripting for dynamic page support is unstable and there is a bug with HTML POST requests that M$ refuses to fix. I'm not even going to get started about Palm.
I write public safety software and there will always be a market for a portable method to access information for policemen who primarily use bicycles, motorcycles or horses. But writing stuff for the current mess of devices out there just plain hurts. If the Hand held makers would just sit down and agree that their priority is to allow people access to information and all support at least HTML 3.0 standards with CSS and JScript, there would be an explosion of web services and web portals that would actually bring some value to these things. Hand helds right now are just a few steps above Linux for the desktop. Linux is doing much better for application support, but is still mostly a geek toy. At least the handhelds allow a total moron to play solitaire and keep his address book right out of the box.
Disclaimer: For the super busy, high powered business man, being able to sync your Hand held with email and calendar functions is a service worth it's weight in gold. However, until they offer some value to the other 90% of us, the parent poster is dead right about the cell phones.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
/. is largely populated by faithful, Unix-loving geeks who view anything to do with Microsoft as The Great Satan.
The Unix model of programming is to have one tool do one thing well and another to do another thing well. This is why so many text editors, etc. The Microsoft model is to have one tool with the kitchen sink and more.
Having a separate phone and PDA neatly fits the Unix model. The phone is there to make calls and can also act as a modem (Bluetooth is your friend). The PDA is for email, contacts, checkbook, notes, etc.
By contrast, smartphones represent Gatesian bloat and feature creep. They are, inevitably, a half-assed kludge of the two that do both things half-assed but neither particularly well. Usually, you end up with a PDA on a cell-phone sized screen.
Sony's failure had nothing to do with the PDA market being dead. Granted, it's not like it was in the boom days, but it's far from dead. No, Sony's latest units were huge, overpriced ($600 or so), and used their proprietary memory format that just happened to cost double or triple what the others did. Hell, the NX60 (?) had a CF slot, but it only accepted Sony's proprietary wifi adapter. A Sandisk CF wifi adapter costs on the order of $30. Sony's cost $150.
Personally, my Palm Tungsten T has all the usual PDA stuff on it (contacts, calendar, note pad, etc.) plus my checkbook, several games, and an MP3 player. Oh, and did I mention that it also has Bluetooth *and* uses industry-standard SD/MMC cards?
Score another one for open standards.