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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."
People want either highly specialized mini computers (ie audio players), or they want the full power of a computer. Budget laptops don't cost significantly more than some high end PDAs, and you get a lot more flexibility.
Mobile phones with PDA-like functions are whupping the PDA's out of the market.
;)
Bluetooth r0xx0r j00.
Heck, if the iPod could input calandar and contact info, I definitely wouldn't need a PDA.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
...it could be that people in the U.S. are no longer interested in spending $400 on a PDA when they can get a cheap $50 Palm with no frills. Just my two cents.
that would make the Star Trek future all wrong!
It sounds silly, but if we could disable the phone part of a smartphone it could actually be more useful!
I think that the PDA world will take a dive once Handtop computers become available. Computers like the OQO, Flipstart and the Sony VGN-U70 will start to take over. Why have a PDA when you can bring the actual applications and data you want with you anywhere.
Things may not really take off till the second generation of these devices, but I'm looking forward to taking one of them for a test drive.
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
Well, I use my PDA to read books and would think a phone would be a really poor reader given the small screen and smaller battery life. Personally, I don't find carrying a PDA in my shirt pocket and a cell phone on my hip to be that cumbersome.
The PDA is failing for the same reason 3G technology has a slow uptake and is in danger of slipping into moribundency. It's just too much technology that's useless in such a small device while you're on the move. Who really wants to do wordprocessing with something half the size of a tissue box while they're sitting on the toilet? The tech just isn't feasible; it's cramped and the UI is poor. Costs are still ramped up, which doesn't help either.
Well, not really. Companies were making laptops smaller and smaller upon the release of the centrino chip thereby rendering the wimpy (by comparison) PDAs obsolete. But that wasn't really the final nail in the coffin - mobile phone manufactures kept upping the resolution on cell phones screens while increasing their size centimeter by centimeter. The result is a mobile phone that can store all your necessary info in one pocket, and computers that you had no reason not to take on lunch break and inbetween home and work.
PDAs were a gimmick, nothing more. No matter how shiny they got, and no matter how many I owned (which amounted to 3 at one point, a palm V, a palm Vx, and one of those ridiculous Sony Clie jobbers) they still couldn't replace the ease of use a cell phone provided me.
Gaming on them was a horrific joke as well. What with the release of the PSP on the horizon and my Gameboy SP charging next to me through USB, the PDAs of the world were simply replaced by superior technology.
This happens to fads. I don't see many people wearing 'hammer pants' anymore, despite the fact they provided the same use as any other pair of pants.
++
I make no apologies for the run-on sentences contained above.
schild
editor, f13.net
Yes.
I have an iPaq and a Palm (built into my phone). The biggest problem with most PDAs are their battery issues. The last time the battery went out on my iPaq and I lost everything that was it. It's too frustrating to have to completely re-install all the software when something like this happens. I know there are work-arounds, but most of the PDAs out there by default have this issue.
I generally used my PDA for an address book. It's useful there but otherwise it's a gimmick.
The only "additional" feature I require on my PDA in addition to all the run of the mill stuff is that it runs Nethack. The Zaurus does this nicely, so I won't have to buy a new PDA while this one lasts and doesn't break ;-)
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
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.
Anyway, the Treo 600 has it's flaws (most notably the mediocre screen resolution). But before I got this device, every PDA I ever had was something I used for a few months then it fell into general disuse because of the effort to charge it, sync it and use it. This is the first PDA device that I actually use regularly and believe I will continue to use regularly, and that convenience is worth a whole lot. So the PDA is dead... long live the PDA-phone.
Well, if you're a consultant and need to remember 400+ clients, phone numbers, and emails, it can be rather helpful.
Yep...Satnav. I work as a lorry driver in the UK (trucker) for an employment agency. I've got an Ipaq 2210 and run TomTom Navigator 3 on it. AS I'm not in the same vehicle for more than a couple of days at a time it allows me to take it from vehicle to vehicle and as it does street level, it has replaced the massive box of town/city maps I had. Its bluetooth too so it uses GPRS through my mobile phone to get traffic updates as I go.
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
... but not because PDA's are DEAD. As others have mentioned, it's more that the form of PDA's has changed. Smart phones and so forth... the actual PDA will become integrated, not die. Now, I'm probably in the minority here, but personally I'm one of those people who PREFER carrying a seperate PDA and cellphone. Quite simply it's because while on the phone I often have to write notes, check my calendar and so forth. To-date I've not seen a smart phone that does this quite as well as my old PDA and basic cellphone. Also, another thing to note is that PDA sales are declining because the market is saturated. The people who use PDA's like me have already bought one, and to be honest there are few if any reasons to upgrade a PDA quite as often as a laptop or cellphone. The drive just isn't there... there are no "killer apps". I don't play games on my PDA... I don't keep MP3's on it... it's for my important data and notes. Now, a friend of mine recently bought one of the new state of the art Ipaq's... all the bells and whistles... and when I played with it I noticed a slight increase in response but it provided me nothing over the Ipaq 3855 I've owned for the better part of three years now and still rely on every day. Sure, eventually the battery will die and I'll invariably upgrade... but other than this fact there are no other compelling reasons to upgrade like with a Windows PC (full Windows, not PocketPC). And as for the cost of laptops compared to PDA's... well I find the form factor of my Ipaq much easier to lug around between meetings than my Dell Latitude... and while I like working on my Dell it's a PITA in a meeting that may move around the building at short notice (due to presenting information to vendors and so forth). My PDA is damned handy... hell I even use it when driving if I need to make notes to myself I just whip it out of my belt holster and press the record button. When I get home, I upload and transcribe those notes as necessary. Food for thought?
As someone who routinely carries a PDA, mobile phone, digital camera and USB keychain drive, I love the idea of convergence, but I don't think technology has reached the point where it's matured enough to make combination devices really as useful and as feasible as separate devices are currently. The reason? Primary battery power, IMO.
My cellphone is a fairly basic Motorola, its batteries can last for days without recharging, and I can leave it switched on at all times, day and night, just popping it into the charger as required. Sure, it doesn't have a colour screen or multimedia messaging or PDA functions, but the fact that it's always ready to use is crucial to the way I use a phone.
My PDA, on the other hand, has a big 320x320 in full colour, oodles of flash memory, sound and video capabilities, and so on. However, the way I use a PDA is totally different. If I left the PDA on for more than around 4-6 hours, the battery would be gone. Fortunately, I use the thing intermittently, only turning it on when I want to check my tasks and appointments or record a memo.
If you can make me a Smartphone that has audio and video capabilities with a large screen that can be left on all day like my current cellphone can, I'd buy it without much hesitation. But that's not the case at the moment.
Today's smartphones are cellphones with poor battery life and/or PDAs with small screens and limited abilities. They're not perfect for either task. Until they are, I'll keep carrying my separate devices, and until we see a PDA with a 4 megapixel camera with an optical zoom lens, a flash and full manual exposure control, I will keep my digicam, too.
Perhaps fuel cells are the answer, but until they're mainstream, why aren't we seeing more Smartphones that could be put into a "super low power" mode - where the colour screen is switched off and replaced by a simple 100x100 pixel mono display, and the 400MHz XScale is switched off and the phone functions run on a 1MHz VLSI to conserve battery life when the thing is sitting in your jacket pocket?
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.
What's this talk about a PDA industry then?
Why spend money on a PDA when you've got beermats?
In an amazingly cheap package Beermats offer:
- open, multi-language platform
- totally flexible UI
- multi-person visible display surface
- great information exchange function
- unlimited battery life
- great array of games
- OEM-custom skinning
- extremly svelte form-factor.
- comes free with Beer!
And if all of this isn;t enough, power-users can always step up to Backs of Envelopes.
- It took western civilisation 2000 years to ensure popular literacy, and now we work with icon driven GUI's. Go figure.
The apparent decline in PDA sales is due to popular PDAs like the Treo being classified as "smart phones", and not being counted in PDA sales.
I think it's less an issue of PDAs not having uses as it is an issue of market saturation. Sony's mistake is that they literally came out with new PDAs almost every month (and if they weren't released in the US, they were released in Japan and never made it to the states). People who use PDAs just don't replace their PDAs often enough to sustain as many handhelds as there are, much less as many as Sony came out with. Sony's other mistake was to revamp its high-end line so often. $700 PDAs are especially not replaced very often. With the speed at which these things were replaced in their lineup, I can't imagine they were able to produce and sell enough to get good margins on those products. It would have been nice for them to have researched how people actually use their PDAs rather than try to cram everything they could into one of them, since a PDA too big to take with you is not one that you'll use, no matter how much "convergence" you've got in one.
I think Sony's other mistake (one that PalmOS might be repeating with its next OS) was to not support the Mac platform out of the box. Many Mac users (and I'm including myself here to some degree) are notorious for wanting the latest and greatest gadgets. My first PDA was an early Sony. When I switched to the Mac platform shortly after that I had to buy a third party conduit, which became outdated when I upgraded shortly after that to Mac OS X--and then there was NO conduit I could use, no matter how much I was willing to pay. So after three yearss my Sony PDA outlived my ability to use it with my current computer. When I was ready to replace my Sony CLIE with a new Palmtop, I didn't feel that I could rely on my Sony to be "supported" by even a third party after three years, so I went with another brand.
Alex.
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.
Yeah, though I'd hardly call that a decline. The markets have simply merged and become more popular than ever.
It's tragic. Laugh.
So what's wrong with this picture? Should I upgrade my cell phone to do all this stuff rather than just be a phone? BTW, my wife depends on her PDA as a physician for everything from textbooks of internal medicine, to drug formularies, to calculators for blood oxygen levels. Please don't take away our PDAs!!
I think that they have figured out that everyone is going to have a mobile phone anyway, but only very few geeks are going to buy PDAs. So they figure that the PDA market is saturated and is not going to grow much, but simple PDA functions in smartphones will grow.
In a Swedish newspaper today (SvD) there was a comment on Sony PDAs. They have a deal with Ericsson to produce mobile phones, and that deal forbids them from adding mobile phone functionality to their PDAs. So it is only logical that Sony will add their previous Clie functions into the Sony Ericsson phones instead.
)9TSS
I've never had a reason to get a new PDA because my Newton MP2100 still does everything that I need it to do. Keeps my addresses, passwords and it's my alarm clock. I've even bought a house with it as I used it as a fax machine. Still no need to get a new PDA and when I use it people ask me where they can get one. They think it's brand new since many of them have never seen one before. Hands down, still the best PDA ever made.
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 edit my fiction using DocumentsToGo.
I keep my comics collection in an excel spreadsheet so when I'm going through 25 cent bins I know exactly what my wantlist is and I don't accidentally buy any duplicates.
I read Project Gutenberg texts and books purchased from Peanut Press (or whatever they're called and whoever they're owned by these days) when I'm shopping with my wife.
I listen to lectures and audiobooks in MP3 format.
I do play games, though not very often.
I write memos and story ideas down on the go. There's also a voice memo recorder which I use when driving.
I keep organized with my address book and calendar. I've never been able to be organized in either area until I bought a Palm.
I keep some photographs with me.
I keep a dictionary on my Palm, which is invaluable for when I have time to write.
I'm just as likely to take my Palm with me when I go out as I am my phone. If/when my Palm breaks, I'll replace it.
They should have taken a page from HP and released a version of all their pda's that have a camera with a version that does not have the camera. I'm just wanting on HP to release a pda that has 480x640 resolution and I will buy one. This isn't so much HP's faught, but the idot at MS who decided to hard code in the screen resolution at 240x320 into the OS!!! I mean seriously, did they REALLY think that no one would want to use a resolution other then that? Did they believe that LCD screen technology would not continue to inovate and develop higher resolution screens? Or were they simply pressed for time because they were late to market on an immerging new operating system market for mobile devices? I think it was the latter...
Anyway back on topic, I would have been glad to fork over $400-700 for a top of the line clie that had WiFi, bluetooth, a 480x640 3.5" screen, and possibly CF or SDIO memory slot, WITHOUT a camera. Besides if I WANTED a digital camera, I would have just spent the $50 for a similar 1.1 megapixel camera (or modded a Kodak "1 time use" digital camera to a multiuse camera for $25).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
That's why you keep the data on the computer and sync it to the PDA, why trod around a computer all the time? Can't fit a laptop in your pocket.
My Palm Tungsten T3 has been invaluable to me. Quick note taking, music playing, the odd game here or there, ebooks, internet through bluetooth, etc. All on one device I can fit in my pocket and has 0 startup time.
Why people think laptops are a replacement for this is way beyond me. You want to take a quick note, ok, so you're going to grab your huge laptop, wait for it to boot up, open an application and type it?
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.
I started with a Palm III. Nice machine in many ways but really limited by an over-small screen and Graffiti. I never got more than 30wpm on it and tended to have very poor accuracy even with training - it's just too sensitive to small changes and I found by playing with giraffe that there were some basic errors in its topography software.
;-) but in all other respects it's just great.
Nearly 4 years later, I _love_ my PDA and can't imagine doing without it. It's a Psion 5mx.
The upright machines have screens small enough that you can't read any colume of data on them and a data entry system that gets fiddly if you're writing anything longer than a shopping list. A keyboard can be fitted, yes, but you have to take it out of your pocket, build the thing and then find a table. In a few hours I'll be at my church with my Psion, taking sermon notes with the Psion resting on my knees.
An upright looks better in the shops because it's cheaper, smaller and appears easier to use on the move - but long-term use shows you've got to be really keen to make it worthwhile, they don't actually fit particularly comfortably in your shirt pocket and that they're far from ideal as anything other than readers. A colour-screened keyboard machine like most of the WinCE machines equally looks better in the shops but is too expensive and eats batteries. WinCE in general tends to look better because they've got more memory and faster processors - but, just like old Windows v anything else battles, poorer design means it _needs_ those higher spec components to be usable - and the trade-off is in lower battery life.
The Psion, when you actually give it a try, has a keyboard I can touchtype on at little less speed than a desktop keyboard, battery life of 2-3 weeks normal use on 2 AAs and a screen I can really read sensible amounts of data on. I've regularly typed notes in meetings and so on on it with no difficulties. It still fits in a jacket pocket, it's cheaper and it's got a pretty good default software bundle. OK, the synchronisation software was, erm, sub-optimal
And it died because the marketers consistently tried to sell machines that look better in the shops but don't actually work as well day-to-day, and the sector's now dying because people are stuck with these poor machines and realising they're poor.
Someone, please, buy up Psion's keyboard patent and build a modern 5 that can sync. It won't be too expensive and it'll just be a lovely machine that will make PDAs worthwhile again.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Wouldn't that information be better contained in a good PIM on a laptop system?
...I can't easily remove the hard drive and recover the data with another system.
Yes, if you can A) carry the laptop in your shirt pocket; and B) get the information within 5 seconds (and that *includes* getting the device out of your pocket.
I wouldn't trust any important data to a PDA. Too fragile...
That's what syncing to your computer is for. Also, backing up to the removable memory in your PDA. I have a complete backup on my laptop (files copied to another workstation) and I have another on a memory stick.
What's your point? If the hard drive in your computer dies, "easy" recovery isn't possible there, either. In the case either of a PDA or a computer, you have to think about what might go wrong and take appropriate measures; backups should be part of your strategy if the information is important.
As for "fragile", don't get me started. Thanks to certain brain-dead policies at work, I've gone through 7 different laptops in the last year. In seven years, I've used three PDAs, and only one actually died.
For one, you cannot connect devices like keyboards, gpses etc. etc.
Wrong. You can use bluetooth keyboards with many phones.
Can you install a diet program in a phone as easily as in a pda?
Yes. Most phones run either Java, or Symbian, both of which have free SDKs. And there are thousands of apps available.
Can you program your pda?
Yes, see above.
A pda is a programmable computer, can be said the same for a phone (running maybe a proprietary OS) ?
Yes it can. See above.
As it has already been suggested in this thread (albeit somewhat sarcastically), this is the time to let Sharp know now there are markets in the West virtually without competition for quite a while, and a geek population eager to spend some money on what should be their next incarnation of the Zaurus (i.e. in reasonable amounts on reasonably-equipped devices: Who wouldn't want a clamshell version of this Linux machine if it was more easily procurable, and finally came with 802.11g & Bluetooth...). ;-) should just do the trick and get the subject some management attention...
A Slashdot effect from a few hundred thousand potential buyers' eMail (form) requests
To appeal to me a PDA has to have support for at least VGA width, and a keyboard. I just don't want to have to write in calligraphy on the screen.
Only the Psions - now deceased as a range - and the expensive HP Jornadas have this sort of design. IMO we need more. Preferably with modems built in and an ability to sync with a Mac!
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
And with hires screens (640*480, yummy), you can actually see what you are editing.
But Microsoft and Palm are moving much too slowly. New features in PalmOS 5? It's ARM-compatible. New features in Windows Mobile 2003 SE? Landscape support. That's all! They should get off their a**es and improve the devices. What about putting more of the Windows API in Pocket PCs so that apps actually _get_ ported to Pocket PCs? What about speech recognition and dictation? What about making data replication work instead of relying on ActiveSync? etc. etc.
Make PDAs more useful and customers will buy them.
Is it lack of manpower or of imagination?
-mk
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
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...
Maps! These work better with a larger screen.
- Advantages:
- Costs 500-900 times less than a PDA
- Unlimited battery power
- Small, and actually flexible so it's more comfortable in your pocket
- Much easier to write in and read out of than a PDA
- Unique "page" system can contain any kind of information, stored in a particualr 3-dimensional space so you can easily remember where you wrote any particular thing.
- Easily replaced at minimal cost
I am at pains to think of any way in which this rather pedestrian thing has any serious disadvantages over a real PDA. Anything of unlosable importance I copy into my personal wiki or addressbook.yahoo.com. Sure, I've thought about buying a real PDA! I settled on this because I didn't want to get some $300 device lost or stolen on a trip I was taking across Europe (that's what my iPod is for). Some people seem to have etched into their brains that (newer + more expensive + more "advanced") must always == better. Well, I'm here to tell you it's not always the case. Maybe having a PDA just encourages you to keep good habits, and you were drawn into it because you thought it was cool, but you could actually do the same thing more efficiently using something rather old and traditional and inexpensive.The problem with the market right now is that it's shifting. Standard PDA models are actually falling out of favor, as the current future is really in the convergence market. PDAs and cell phones are increasingly finding themselves in overlapping regions, and consumers are looking to cut down on the number of devices they carry. As it is right now, I personally carry a Palm Vx and my cell phone with me quite often, and it would be amazing if I could only carry one item.
/. reader it sucks. But if you're a soccer mom, it might be just right. The fact that it's priced at $99 and is one of the best selling PDAs of all time probably shows how untapped this market remains to be.
Handspring realized this quite a while ago, and now the fruits of their efforts can be realized in the Treo 600. While not a perfect product, it is probably the best convergence device out there. It runs Palm OS5, but has incredibly strong telephony functions. A lot of people simply love theirs (I'm looking to get one when Verizon certifies it for use on the network, and when my contract expires).
Handspring is now a unit of PalmOne, which does mean that even if the market moves out from under PalmOne, they'll be able to react as necessary. PalmSource also renamed OS5 to Garnet (targeted for less powerhungry cell phones) and OS6 is Cobalt (for the power PDA users).
Symbian enjoys a nice presence with Nokia and S/E phones as well. It might be worth noting with the availability of Palm Garnet and Sony's exit from the PDA space, there remains an unlikely possibility for Sony to continue working with Palm.
The PDA space isn't completely done yet though. Just like any other market, it's probably waiting for its next "killer app." Some other poster mentioned how much the Zire21 sucks. Well yeah, if you're a
Personally, I think PDAs would be able to last a lot longer if Bluetooth was deployed more widely. Think of it: the integration of a PDAphone but the power of having two separate devices. It's quite promising, but the cell phone makers and network providers probably aren't going for it, as it means slightly lower profits. With convergence devices, you have to get them from your provider and instead of buying a $50 phone w/BT you're buying a $200-300 PDAphone with a gimmicky camera and other things. More money for them. Of course there remains the two devices issue, but it would just offer different markets.
Actually, it's more like open the iBook, Stickies.app is already running, notebook wakes in 2-3 seconds, type, close lid, you're done.
Now, that said, even an iBook (less than 5 lbs, very small footprint) is not 'pocketable'. But other mini-notebooks are, and have power management features as good as or better than PDAs.
Its called a Universal Turing Machine...
> Most phones are locked to one service provider
This seems to vary from country to country. Anyway all phones can be unlocked pretty easily at your local phone dealer. Some can even be unlocked with the help of the codes that can be downloaded from the Internet.
> So you may have to transfer your data to a new phone, and that is not a simple process.
There are software packages that will allow you to do complete backup (settings/messages/phone book) of your phone. Offcourse your phone needs to be able to communicate with your computer in some way (bluetooth/ir/cable).
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
I use my PDA to carry arround the thousands of pages of .pdf files I need for work. If it wasn't able to read those comfortably, I would have no use for it. A friend who is a doctor has put his medical references on his PDA and carries them everywhere.
As a note-taker, appointment maker it sucks.
It plays nethack, too.
They are not finished, they are evolving. There is that much gizmoz you can carry on you. I have PDA, phone and iPod (plus walled, bluetooth headset). I have to carry all this stiff on my and charge it.
This calls for combining functions to decrease number of devices. Ideally all 3 (PDA, iPod and Phone) should be the same device.
It is going in this direction, but not quite there yet. My Clie could play MP3, but battery life and storage size is too small. My iPod could work as address book, but there is no way to edit data on it - only view. My cell phone have some PDA functions, but due to small screen and most importantly poor keyboard they are not really useful.
I've really enjoyed PDAs over the past few years, but This Tungsten C is probably my last. What *I* use my PDA for is keeping track of my contacts and appointments. I also use it for brief emails when there is access to WiFi.
But enhanced cellphones really do this job BETTER. I can dial or message my contacts straight from the addressbook, and there's one less device to carry.
The article is right that PDAs will survive, but I think they'll find new users. As they become available with hard drives, PDAs could become portable (and continuously update-able) manuals, databases, order entry devices, etc. Heavy messaging belongs on small laptops. Contact management and appointments get shunted to cellphones.
PDAs end up being networked business devices: information terminals for people who need portability but aren't doing much content creation. That's the province of laptops and tablet computers, which will get lighter and more powerful. Cellphones are the communications platform (group calendaring is a communications feature). I think most people will prefer their entertainment to be on a dedicated device like an iPod. Who wants to be interrupted by the boss while you're listening to music or watching streaming video? Keep that crap on another box.
Someone mentioned note-taking. Heavy note-taking, such a meeting minutes, is content creation. Use a laptop. I think voice recognition will fill the need for post-it type entries. Dictate to your cellphone, and it gets recorded or dumped to text. MUCH better than Graffiti or a small keyboard, huh?
Apple saw this coming. They were right not to bring Newton 2 to market, cool as I'm sure it would have been.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
are you ready for it to break? just judging by personal experience and the experience of everyone i know who's had one, your sidekick is past due for a catastrophy.
one of my friends has had his sidekick replaced *four* times already. i'm going to wait for 2.0 before i try one again.
A PDA is a satalite computing device. You use it for quick updates and little else, typically. Its major use is that you can pull it out quickly from a pocket and check your contacts, todo list, and more! On my Palm, for example, I can pull out the application Due Yesterday and check my GPA in all my classes, what assignments are due, etc.
People may say, "hey, why use a Palm when you can use a cell phone or laptop?"
I also have a cell phone that claims to have PDA support. Unless you own a P800 or a P900, the interface on a cellphone is too clunky. Graffiti or the recognizer on a PocketPC will beat the shit out of the tap entry methods that cellphones use. The major cons of the cellphone are that the interface is crap, there isn't a large library of extension software, and it's not easy to sync with my PC.
The cons of a laptop are just as serious. First, they cost about 3-4x the price of even the most fancy 500$ Palm units with built in cameras. They don't really fit in my pocket, either. Even if they could, chances are I wouldn't be able to whip it out and hit a button and have the unit power up in less than 1 second like a Palm does. I'm always having to use a large physical keyboard, even if I'm not seated at a desk or table with a laptop. And chances are I'll have to deal with Windows, unless Apple starts making the units, as Linux doesn't tend to work on a laptop without much messing around. For all the effort, I'd rather have the smaller unit which costs less and Just Works (TM).
Plus, with Bluetooth, my Palm can sync its contacts with the cellphone, control it for outgoing dialing, use it for sending SMS, etc, while it's in my pocket. The PDA interface is much more flexible and has a much larger screen real estate, so it's like I've upgraded my phone without making it into something the size of a brick!
So why choose something that doesn't have these size, speed, and cost benefits? I don't get it.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
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
the sidekick can't be used with any other service. problem... solved?
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
I couldn't agree with you more. I love my SideKick (that I'm using to post this reply), and frequently have PDA owners drooling over it. This is especially true in the MANY circumstances where I whip it out to google for something, check the weather or traffic-cams before hitting the road, check online prices while at a computer-show, etc. About the only problems with it, really aren't problems with IT, but problems with T-Mobile! You can't install non-T-Mobile ringtones. You can't install non-T-Mobile software. I use my AIM on it all the time, but many of my friends only use YahooIM... someone already wrote a Y!I'm client for it (check freshmeat), but you have to be a registered developer to be able to install it!
- Posted via Danger HipTop2 / T-Mobile Sidek!ck II -
I used to be a palm zealot. Great design, initially. 68k, 1 meg of RAM, and always on. Thousands of programs appeared on the net for free. I used it for a calendar, and to schedule appointments, and to keep track of my time, and where I was. I used the address book rather violently -- and picked-up hundreds of contacts (imported from my old Casio BOSS, and collected through the years). I also downloaded neat programs, and experimented with development. Truly a neat system 1997, and ahead of it's time. (Of course, I drooled over the Apple Newtons!)
Connectivity is really the thing for me, being able to transfer data/programs easily, as well as to other people is something I need to do. I admit it, I'm a geek, and rely on this stuff. The Palm's serial port, while great, required a special cradle, and even with two, it's still a pain. Don't get me wrong, AvantGo, and the whole syncing thing is great, especially if you spend time on trains, busses, airports, or meetings. Infra-red is a really great technology, and I'd like to see it's use more widely expanded, to include tv-remotes as well as whatever other standards are out there for transcieving via infra-red (ie IrDA, etc).
Bluetooth really takes the cake on connectivity, except for it's bloated stack, and silly implimentation. Wi-Fi or soft-modem technology would be a great alternative. Using bluetooth, I can synchronize my Nokia 3650 without even taking it out of my pocket - nuts a-frying be damned. This is something far more attractive than even more icky cables, and easier than pulling-out the device and pointing it at something.
Having a Nokia 3650, I take pictures all the time, so it's nice to bluetooth them at my workstation, or drag them from my phone onto my desktop. I can do this while my phone is charging in the other room!
All of the features I used to use my Palm for, work on my phone. Plus, I can take pictures, and make calls. This makes me not wonder why Sony stops making PDAs. Why do we need an additional device? Now, having more computing power, that's one benefit, but for special applications, and extended uses, a full-on PDA might make more sense.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
My mobile (Japanese PHS system) has a color screen plus all the usual bells and whistles and I swear I only need to charge it every week or so. Granted I don't get a lot of calls, but at least the standby time is great. It must be the different system.
As for PDAs, I started with a Newton years ago and up through a handspring and a clie, all of which I gave away after a while.
Now I just carry a little Moleskine notebook for PDA-type functions.
Really.
I'm not a Luddite or anti-technology, but the benefit of having a thing full of notes that will never be obsolete or need batteries is strong. (Don't worry, they're overpriced, too, satisfying that "spend" urge. )
For backups, I scan pages that I want to keep. I've even emailed scans to coworkers. It works well, as I have one of those scanners with a "single button scan" setup.
It never crashes and if I lose it, I'm only out the 15 bucks for a new one.
My writing is better, too, as I use the notes I make in the book as a reference when I type it into my powerbook later.
I really love not having to charge it.
No wall-wart to buy funky European adapters for.
Great tactile experience: Good paper that you can use with a fountain pen. It's just the right size. The strap makes a satisfying "snap" sound. It's black. I even sketch occasionally.
For input, my current choice is a sterling silver Parker 75. $40 from an antique shop.
My PDAs were never this useful. No phone interface will ever be this useful, though a camera phone could easily take photos of the pages in the book and mail them to your regular email account or even to your blog as appropriate.
There's also the "cafe coolness" factor. I never felt like really putting thoughts and impressions into my PDA. I do with the notebook. Even an occasional watercolor, though it hasn't replaced my Nikon. It's a pleasure to sit at a cafe and actually WRITE something.
Of course, it doesn't do audio or video, but I have an iPod that I rarely carry anymore and a PowerBook that shows video full-screen when I want that, which never happens to be when I'm out somewhere where I wouldn't have my laptop.
-- My Weblog.
I am responsible for IT matters in a company with 28 remote sites. Although I'm never 'on call' after working hours, I need to be 'available' for consulting on technical issues nearly 24/7 but I also have a life (honest!). If I'm 'out and about' I can still access any of our network resources via my GPRS mobile phone and a bluetooth link to an iPAQ PDA. The PDA acts as a:
1) SSH terminal (pockeTTY) for our Linux servers
2) Remote Desktop to our Windows servers
3) Remote support tool for desktop PCs using a Pocket PC version of VNC.
Plus of course the usual Web browsing and email checking.
The PDA means I can go out without lugging a laptop everythwere or having to go home or to the nearest office if there's a minor crisis. With the PDA I can 'dial in' from almost anywhere - a few months ago I fixed a print spool problem on a Windows 2000 server while the passenger in a car travelling along the M4 motorway in the UK, and more recently I took a 10 minute 'timeout' from a meal in a Chinese restaurant to reprogram a router. The alternative would be for me to stay in all the time.
I have tried a smartphone for all of this but the screens are just not big enough.
AT&ROFLMAO
when my 4-year-old Handspring Edge does everything I need a PDA for so well. Plus, if I need to replace it I just go to Ebay and buy another one for $50. The Achille's Heel of the high tech industry is the "upgrade" cycle because if people fail to upgrade then those products will fail. Unfortunately for the PDA industry there is not much need to upgrade because the basic niche the early units filled is still the same niche. And anyway... what is so bad about sellling only a billion dollars of PDAs a year?
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
It's my personal opinion that PDAs do not serve much more than a personal organizer or a toy for 90% of the people out there. Most people do not need a personal organizer, let alone most of the other functions on a PDA.
PDA input is awkward still in most cases. We don't have voice input unless you're recording audio - and a specialized device is still better at that. Handwriting recognition is finickey at best, and chic-key keyboards are only marginally better.
It would be my suspicion that PDAs were so wildly popular for a couple years there because of Star Trek and its tricorders - people wanted those nifty tricorders, but jumped the gun a bit. However, PDAs don't have enough practical use for the common person. Even for business use, PDAs seem to be a niche market for those that are more into technology. A pad of paper is often less hastle and more convenient for most folks, what with battery concerns, keeping it from falling on the floor, etc.
I don't think PDAs will become truely useful for most people until they become the "ultimate information tool" with little tinkering - a digital keychain, of sorts. Use it to store your unlock codes for your car, use it as a TV remote, use it as a dictionary, use it with GPS and for referencing city maps, and use it to communicate.
I'm sure there are a lot of interesting, truly useful features which will crop up in the next couple of years. Current phones seem to be going in that general direction, but at htis point they've just got gimicky features - much like the first PDAs were themselves - such as cameras. The market might very well kill itself off (due to the quickly-evolving cell phone networks), but if not, I suspect highly-integrated "communicators/tricorders" will become all the more niche, while most people stick to the phone + camera.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Links: inspiring: http://slashdot.org/articles/04/06/13/1325218.shtm l?tid=100&tid=137&tid=193
Others: http://www.flipstartpc.com/
What you have to go through to get a point across: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/beta
Vibrant/active SmartSuite users community:
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ssforum.nsf?OpenData ba se
and:
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ssforum.nsf/ SortedAllT hreadedweb?OpenView&ExpandView&RestricttoCategory= Approach
Others:
Approach Users: http://www.xpertss.com/
Approach users: http://jabrown.customer.netspace.net.au/approach/i ndex.htm
FileMaker Pro http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_title= FileMaker-Pro-Gets-Overhaul&story_id=23323&categor y=databases#story-start
---
I watched the flash of the Flipstart. It show, clearly, ms win ce (wince/twitch) on the screen.
Well, maybe hardware manufacturers should REALLY start to "wince", since so many are still reluctant or intransigent about openly and actively adapting their roadmaps to quickly uptake the Linux kernel and Open Source software to move their hardware.
I am sure the cost of the wince-inducing win-ce costs must be a "heart-stop" to Flashtart. The cost of their production and development can dramatically come down if they appoint some pre-tested Linux/C/C++/Java developers who steer or guide or mentor their own developers. The cost of having a team of Linux-oriented developers could be something like granting them free devices for remaining on the team as a consultant of sorts. Maybe the retainer could include an opportunity to be paid, hired, or given more challenging work so as to build their individual resumes.
These companies need to become more creative and more adaptive and less schizoid about "oooh, or proprietary code... our investors will "flip-OUT"". No, such investors my be needing to be flipped-off and flung out, if they stodgily, intransigently hold back a company from taking a critical but necessary leap of faith.
If the leap of faith is unpalatable to the existing structure, then they should spin off one with the right to fold it back in once it proves itself as a proof of concept. If it bombs, at least it is outside of the main structure and can be gradually deprecated and suppressed if it is embarrassing enough. Otherwise, to just run one train and let it consume all the fuel is like refusing to offer a higher-speed, alternate express car between the regular runs. All they need is a spur and a shunt, and a diversion of resources to an open, but less-consuming set of eyes, assists, and sneak previews and some enticements plans.
An ideal I have to help get images and spreadsheets out of tiny and therefore almost useless PDAs is to make the PDA project the data to a receptive wall panel. The panels should run off AC, be light, carryable, and hangable. They could have an amplifier and a small Linux kernel that allows the flexi-screen to replace flatpanels. The device could act as a router or bridge or amplifier of data inputs so that multiple parties in a conference room can merge database data.
MySQL would be great tool for this, since InnoDB is transactional. People in meetings could ad-hoc create databases, run what-if scenarios, and maybe get a LOT more work done in such meetings.
Nurses and inventory personnel could move from room to room where the reception room or stockroom window itself is a smart-assed- piece of glass that reduces an undersized PDA to a mere input/conversation device that projects and receives data from a large screen.
In a fallback scenario, the device could be provided with a traditional AC adapter so it can have more oomph to deliver the images onto a standard, dark wall. So, if a stockroom has a flat surface, even the floor, the user could punch in or call up data, then project the information long enough to read i
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
PDAs are going away? Did they ever get started?
Since the early days of these PDA devices, I have always found them to be overrated, lacking in features and too expensive for what they do.
My wife and I own two PDAs, but they both mostly collect dust. I bring mine with us on vacation so that I have easy access to a bunch of information, but that's about it.
I would love to be able to combine my PDA and Cell Phone into a single device. Basically, I want a mobile phone with the 3 basic PDA functions: Contact list, Calendar, Todo list.
However, I have never seen a model that does this well for a decent price.
I see alot of crappy devices with features I don't need: I don't need 16-million battery draining colors, I don't want a video camera in my PDA and an mp3 player is nice but not necessary.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
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.
/. 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.
I've had various PDAs; none of them helped me to achieve anything. Most of them were presents that I used for roughly 2-4 weeks after receiving them. Most of the time I used the because I either had nothing to do or during boring lectures when I enterntained myself with some stupid games. With this in mind, I declared PDAs absolutely useless and decided to sell all of them. I have been PDA free for over a year and it feels good.
First of all, PDA means having one more thing that I need to use. If I want to use my cell phone, I need to get the numbers from PDA into the cell phone, if I get a new phone number via a phone call (caller ID), it means that I have to put it into my PDA. Then there is Address Book and iCal that sit on my Application folder on my Mac. I need to syncronize them with my PDA and the phone that has been out of sync with my PDA. The fun never stops. The best part of having a PDA or a cell phone that remembers numbers for you is the fact that you do not know any of the phone numbers!
I decided to cut back on automation once my mom moved into a new house. She had a new phone number that I stored in PDA. I was too freaky lazy to put it into my phone and when I lost the PDA I realized that I did not know my moms phone number. It was the first time in my life when I understood that without that damn PDA I could not call any of my friends. Fuck, that totally sucked!
I sold all my PDAs, got rid of the cell phone (the landline works just as well, thank you very much!) and decided to keep all my information on my computer via Address Book and iCal. My computer is backuped on a regular basis, therefore I am not afraid of losing important information. Moreover, now I am actually forced to memorize phone numbers and it feels great. I can call almost everybody I know without checking some freaking device. I have less things to carry in my pockets and if I am bored while riding a bus, I read.
I do not think that any of PDAs that are currently out on the market can justify their costs. The built-in cameras suck, most of the features are designed either to drain the battery or to purchase more accessories from that specific vendor. Going back to paper organizers was not for me; therefore, I decided to settle for the solution that came with my G4. It is not the best option, but it was there already. I am sure that there are certain products for Windows and *Nix that can do the same thing.
I think the next step of PDA evolution should be to either integrate more useful things into them (IR-related tools, mostly, to interact with all those IR gadgets about today's modern environment), or for a form factor change away from the awkward square single-hand "palmtop" device.
If the second evolution, this is why: PDAs are much more powerful than the data assistants of 5+ years ago, and are even as powerful, if not more powerful than, the desktop processors of the time. They could do a Lot More than they are currently being used for - glorified contact books and notepads, with a little bit of playing cards and fooling around. Even holding a square PDA is a strain on the wrist for a prolonged period of time - it's awkward.
When I bought my laptop, I was looking for something that was ultra portable, sturdy, and had good battery life. I couldn't find anything on the market with a reasonable price which fit my needs and could still serve as a short-term-use device (ie, something I could use for a day or two, and then sync with a workstation/server, only keeping small amounts of work at a time). There is currently nothing in the market which provides a full day's worth of battery life and allows for use as a general use computing device (and by "general computing" I mean geeky shit, not Word and solitaire).
I see the technology employed in handhelds as ideal for this. The Sony Clie Communicator (to be RIP shortly, it would seem), as well as the already extinct clamshell Zaurus were steps in the right direction, I feel - but they stopped short by failing to have a 10-finger keyboard. They also cost obscene amounts of money - largely, I suspect, due to the novelty of such a device.
I imagine there's a fairly large undeveloped market for devices with 4x3 aspect ratio screens with 10-finger typeable keyboards, sturdy construction (aka, TI calculator/gameboy classic sturdy), and day-long portable use characteristics. I can imagine paying $600 for such a device personally - even if the technical specification is less than current 'cutting edge' PDAs - because there is a significant amount of functionality which is gained by having durability and full-fledged typing characteristics.
I imagine an inexpensive solidstate 'laptop'/typeable PDA/palmtop/whatever could be made for under $1000, and maybe even $600, quite reasonably and would see a fair amount of sales, considering the popularity of some similar attempts in the past - the original Libretto, the Fujitsu Lifebook P1000, and any number of others. I imagine the actual cost would be roughly 800$+, though, as demand would likely make them fairly expensive. Considering the cost of a Sony Clie peg-ux50 is $600 and comes with a built-in camera and wireless, and the Zaurus SL-C860 can be found for $700 with much more impressive statistics than the Clie. Here's what I imagine could be made for such a general fee:
- Xscale 400MHz CPU
- 96Mb RAM
- 64Mb storage
- 640x460 res screen of moderate (5"? 6"?) size
- typeable keyboard (large enough for an average person to fit a full set of hands on)
- TypeII CF and SD Card slots
- direct USB connectivity to other devices
- a microphone and an earphone jack
- a reasonably rich operating environment (I'm thinking Linux/Qtopia, as you'd be able to do actual work)
- a sturdy titanium case w/ rubber corner pads
- a 10 hour battery (which the clie communicator has)
- possibly built in wifi, or an easy way to 'perminantly' add it (so as to not require the use of a wifi CF card when a CF storage device is in use)
The basic idea here would be for an ultraportable device which wouldn't need a seperate keyboard, and could be used for a full day's worth of work on a single charge of a standard battery for actual productive work (coding, presentation, whatever). I believe that I've heard there already are similar products in Japan; they just haven't made their way over here yet in serious number.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Anybody remember Hasbro's "Clueless Organizer", in bright pink, aimed at high school girls?
What we really need is a standard for hot-synching all the low-end devices.
Maybe ebooks will eventually be read on e-ink paper and such. But for now the PDA is the best way to read them, and for a traveller like me, it's the best way to read in general.
The PDA isn't dead. It's changing. The need for wireless was grossly underestimated. As for the comments about scanning pill bottles, you're not talking about something that a doctor would do, that's a nurse, or a lab tech. You're talking about jobs for at least 3 different people in a hospital. And those jobs are going to be treated differently. If you think a barcode scanner will help a doctor, you might think again. A doctor rarely will need it. A doctor writes prescriptions, orders tests and x-rays. If they dispense anything, it's with a nurse assisting them. The nurse might need a barcode reader.
PDAs are not a gimmick. For years, meetings were much more convenient with the previous days' take of email and info at hand... saving a lot of time running back and forth without a laptop. Are you trying to tell me that all that convenience was wasted? A PDA/cell phone wouldn't have done me any good.
Sony has hinted that they will attack the PDA market without the high-branded CLIE "we've got every feature you could imagine" attitude. They've hinted that the market for the PDA will be specific features, more focused, lower-priced.
Frankly, wireless would be the feature I'm most interested in. And to all you clods crying "Bluetooth r0xx0rs." Balloney. The last thing I need is another dumb box sitting on or around my home machines. Wireless router/firewall, cable modem, USB 1.1 hub (for an old machine that can't get USB 2), USB2, firewire, KVM switch, and now you want bluetooth? Get a life.
I've found a really good PDA without the one feature I want most... 802.11 wireless, but they stuck a f-ing 1meg video cam on the thing. I have 2 mini-DV cameras that fit in my palm. Why would I want somethign that does 240 x 180 in a PDA? Huh? Who's the brain surgeon here? As for wireless, I don't care which format, I can handle all 3. I don't want an add on module that sticks out 3 inches. I want something small. I don't need a phone. If I switch phone companies, I'm screwed. I want it separated. I'm sick of the phone companies locking features away, or charging $10 a month for something that should be free.
Speaking of phones, I want to be able to put my own ringtones in the phone. I don't want to have to pay some schmuck in NJ $2.95 to try out Battle Hymn of the Republic on my cell phone.
And, I don't want to pay $10 a month to send 125 text messages with a cellphone keypad. It's f-ing ridiculous. I don't want to pay $600 for a PDA phone either. I really want them separate. I want to be able to tell my cell phone provider to take a hike if they can't provide service. I'd like to be able to take my PDA with me when and if I left my phone carrier.
-- No sig for you!
So as such, if sales are down, maybe it's not consumer apathy, but more likely that the consumer doesn't have the need to just replace their external brain arbitrarily?
This sig no verb.
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 :)
As long as Palm keep shipping the same old stuff, why should people upgrade? A Palm from 2004 isn't all that much more useful than a Palm from four years ago: it runs basically the same PIM applications and still has most of the same limitations. Screens have gotten a little better, but a 320x320 screen doesn't really display any more information (even Palm's own applications don't handle smaller fonts correctly), and many applications don't support the 320x480 screens. It's also not really surprising that people haven't come up with new killer apps for the Palm--if you spend fighting with the OS and supporting a dozen different versions, they don't have time.
Internet and phone connectivity are such a pain to figure out on most models, too, that people don't use PDAs for that. They probably don't prefer the bulky phone-PDA combos, but it's the only thing they can get to work.
I suspect the situation is not much different with PocketPC.
Once PDA manufacturers figure out how to do a better job on the OS and libraries, then the PDA market will pick up again.
...voice. The telephone.
That's a quote of Jeff Hawkins', and I've got to believe that it's borne out by the numbers.
Hundreds of millions of cellphones are sold every year, and only in the neighborhood of 100 million PDAs have been sold in total to date.
Then by inference it follows that a killer PDA, one that most people will want to use, should have a phone built into it. And it also appears that the market for devices without a phone has flattened, and manufacturers are turning to PDAs with phones in them, and away from PDAs without phones in them.
I own two ipaq H3600's first thing I
did was dump the Pocket PC crap and
put linux on them. With a pcmcia sleeve,
a 10/100 integrated card, and real
trouble shooting tools like tcpdump.
They are the cat's meow when you find
yourself in drop ceiling with a hub
someone stuck there years ago and forgot
about. Last time I pulled out my PDA
in that situation, the tech I was
working with would have killed for
one. If you are trouble shooting a network
problem that takes you into a attic or
into a crawl space that laptop is
not the animal you want to use.
Install prismstumbler and add a
directional antenna, getting a idea
of what the wireless neighborhood
looks like is a piece of cake.
Contacts, phone numbers, notes hell
I got a cheap Casio device that's
better for that stuff and If it gets
run over by a car tire I'm out less
then $50.00.
Great tools do only ONE thing, but do that ONE thing very, very well.
People are willing to carry one device.
People want a phone first; an email or computer or music player second; and a camera last.
Whether the name of the rose is "phone that does PDA tasks" or "PDA that does phone tasks", the rose will smell as sweet.
(The real difference being that if the device must have phone service, then a PDA maker becomes nothing more than one more phone manufacturer for the cellular service companies.)
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Why oh why can't someone produce a decent PAD like they used for passing reports around on Star Trek Voyager and Enterprise?
I had a Jordana for several years and recently replaced it with a iPAQ 4150 (the smallest iPAQ with built in wireless lan). I know this will cause a sharp intake of breath, but as I use Windows the integration with Outlook is superb. I love the way I can copy important information on notes in Outlook and I know it will sync automatically onto the PDA. Over and above the usual contact and diary info too of course.
Other functions are less useful, but nice to have. I have written short articles in Word on a PDA - slow, but beats humping the laptop - used the browser (+ mobile phone) to find train timetable information on the move, and used it to keep up with email while on holiday.
But, it could be improved. True portability at PDA size is nice, but I'd sacrifice a little of that for a larger screen. Which brings me back to the Star Trek PADs. The ones they carry around on Enterprise are about twice the size of a PDA, which seems to me to be ideal. A PDA with a 640 x 480 screen at around twice current PDA width would be great. Small enough to be easily portable but big enough not to feel cramped. Ideally it would fold in hald for transport too
I'm an unusual geek. I don't want a PDA or palmtop computer. If I had one I could use the time on the train I spend travelling to get to work. Fuck that - I write software for eight hours a day and I enjoy an hour reading a book and listening to music travelling each way. So no, they can shove devices that make me work more. :)
With my iPod doing most of what my palm can do as far as reading documents and having my calendars and contacts, as well as a few games and a buttload of music, I find that my Palm does not get used as much as it used to.
If the iPod had a way to enter contact and calendar information with using a computer, then I would find little use for my palm other than having my Filemaker databases, word files and few cool games. Syncing the iPod is certainly much faster than syncing my palm.
... so this is really just a semantical argument. What we're really saying here is that *unconnected* PDA's are on the way out, which I think is true for a lot of devices. Hell, they're even putting Bluetooth into cars.
The major PDA manufacturers are in fact shifting toward producing such connected devices - PalmOne has publically stated this on several occcasions. Within a year almost every PDA will have either telephony and/or WiFi.
And since instant messaging is rapidly emerging as a Killer App for connected devices, imputting methods are going to evolve beyond the simple phone keypads we all know and love. A phone with a QWERTY keypad, for example, and a decent screen looks a lot like, well, a PDA.
Whether the traditional *PDA* players can remain in the game is another question, but we'll still be carrying around devices with our schedules and a few games on them, and they'll make pleasent beeping sounds as well.
You can call them anything you want if it makes you feel better.
-G
www.pixelstatic.com
I couldn't live without my Palm IIIxe. Ebooks on the bus, note-taking in meetings, studying with SuperMemo on potty breaks, are too deeply imbedded in my life now to give up. So if PDAs are dead, what will I do when my Palm's buttons stop working? I'm already on PDA #3 due to worn-out buttons.
If the PDA does die, it will be by suicide: WinCE, massive RAM increases, wireless, etc., all nudge PDAs into the space already occupied by laptops. In that niche, they're doomed--a PDA just isn't as good as a laptop at being a laptop.
That's why I've reluctantly retired my Zaurus and gone back to Palm. What's the use of a handheld that can run MySQL, if the batteries last about 40 minutes?
(The IIIxe sits right in the sweet spot for me: enough RAM for a dozen ebooks; battery life measured in weeks; small form factor; acceptable resolution; easily replaced batteries available from any store; standard serial interface that can talk to my XP, Linux, Mac and GPS. And graffiti kicks the thumb-keyboard's posterior.)
Think about it. The hardware makers treated PDA's as disposable. They keep replacing previous models instead of upgrading them. I don't think people have lost interest in using PDA's. There are plenty in use all around my office. I just think "we" just got collectively tired of blowing $400+ every year for something that still works. Also, many geeks have gone on belt diets. I for one have gotten tired of haveing a pager for work, my personal cell phone, an iPaq, and my ipod on my belt. In the fight for space, the iPaq and pager lost. I just routed the pages to my personal phone, put my notes on the ipod and replaced my watch with a Fossil MSN direct watch that has my calendar. Now I only have a cell and ipod on my belt.
"What I need is an exact list of specific unknown problems we might encounter."
I've been using PalmOS based PDAs since the fist PalmPilot was released and digital organizers prior to that. I don't leave home without my PDA ever.
I have a very hard time understanding how the average person goes through their day without one. I use mine for contact information, calendaring, games, looking up words (carrying a dictionary with you at all times is absolutely fantastic), cached websites(updated twice a day), belive it or not I use that cheezy mirror program that turns your screen black so you can see your reflection better all the time, universal remote, informational databases, notepad, password storage (how the hell do people remember all of their passwords? I have over 50 passwords and the list is growing), family photos, ebooks,...I could go on but you get the point.
I believe the market has gone sour for a few reasons:
A. Modern cell phones do most of the basic PDA functions. B. Old PDAs do most of the basic PDA functions. C. Most people don't own and have never owned a PDA before so they don't know what their missing.
Like I originally stated however, their just going through a transitional period. Once the technology advances to the point that we have phones with month long power supplies, MP3 players, high quality digital cameras and PDA functionality that will make our current PDAs look like calculators (oh yea, I use my PDA as a calculator as well).
^^vv<><>BA
PDA might be finished in the US, but not in other parts of the world... You'd be surprised how many of those you can see on Tokyo's metro. In the US, you're never in a situation where you really need a PDA. You're in your car, at home, in the office, or with friends. In all of these cases you do not need a PDA. PDA's are great when you ride public transport, like I do in Japan. I can prepare my emails, my todo list, my calendar, check my trains, learn japanese... while riding the train, and that's really usefull. Cell phone screen is too small to do any of that. And I see many other people who also type away on their PDA, 2/3 in each car...
A serious multifunction device - somewhere closer to a smaller tablet PC, than a PDA. My pocketPC is limited by is display size and software - it is quite capable(in terms of memory and processing) of doing a whole lot more than my main computer 5 years ago.
If they were to use some clamshell or flexible screen design to make a larger (100mm square) screen, with resolutions up to 800x600, continuing with Arm rpocessors at around 400-800 mhz - these would be small scale general purpose compuing device. I would definately own a general purpose device that could be stored in my pocket.
Communication wise - the device would need to provide Wi-Fi and bluetooth access, with a VoIP system when in range of a Wi-Fi AP and switching to cellular when not. You would have a BlueTooth ear/mouth peice, so all calls would be routed to it, with a stereo option for playing games/listening to mp3s.
An optional fold out keyboard - or simply a mini-usb port for desktop keyboard access would be welcome.
Memory wise - it should be possible to expand main memory, or flash storage. I would recommend CF (for microdrives). Both main memory and storage should be non-volatile - as an eseential feature of the device, and any software for it - is the ability to shut it down - preserving state - anywhere. This would include any games - and having them well written enough that pop-ups and alarms do not crash the machine (pocket PC - scummvm - popups mean crashes).
I would retain the touch screen and stylus, as well as one-touch dictation/recording.
Anyway - this is probably very niche - I do not know how many people would appretiate truly general purpose handheld devices...
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