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."

Comments

free software kills fake upgrades.

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Free software is going to eliminate vendor forced upgrades.

It's funny that you should mention a Handspring Visor that your friend had been using for years. What operating system are they using? Mine came with drivers for Windoze that worked on 98 and NT but had serious issues with 2000. I don't know if there are drivers for XP, but the trend was NO.

Kpilot, however, works and syncs great with KDE's excellent PIM programs. Interestingly enough, my Visor is going to get information from an old job that I though was lost forever. I have an old Windoze 98 backup that I'm going to sync and then move sync with KDE. I've been using it with a serial cable under Debian and my little brother had good experiences with USB stuff and Fedora Core 1. Because of this, it's more useful to me than my fancier and nicer Zaurus which is reported to work with Evolution.

I loved my Handspring and now I can love it again. It got months of service from regular AAA batteries, and worked with rechargeables AAAs. It was cheap when I bought it and I'm sure that replacements can be had for next to nothing used.

It's only a matter of time before I'll be able to easily sync the same data onto my Zaurus, but I'll still have uses for the Handspring. The Zaurus is much nicer, has a music player and can be programmed easily, but the Handspring has all of the above named advantages. Moreover, I'm more comfortable with it's input methods. The Zaurus is just a little different but that matters.

With free software, I only buy a PDA when the features of the new one clearly warrant the purchase. No one is going to be forced to buy a new gadget to get the same feature set again. Free software is making the market more honest.