Slashdot Mirror
Why Have PDAs Failed In The iPod Era?
mikejz84 writes "As the owner of a PocketPC PDA I am a very happy camper, with wifi internet access, Skype Voip, video playback, and of course the ubiquitous mp3 playback. In an era were everyone seems to talk about the Video iPod, and the next generation of mobile devices, it leaves me wondering - I already have all those abilities in a PDA that costs about as much as an iPod. My question for Slashdot: Given that modern PDAs have almost all the functionality of these separate devices, how has Palm and Microsoft/PocketPC developers failed in making PDAs a force in this new era of portable media devices? It is the poor marketing, bad media apps, public perception, or do people simply not want an all-in-one for mobile media?"
the poor marketing ... BINGO. ... BINGO. ... BINGO. ... BINGO.
bad media apps
public perception
do people simply not want an all-in-one for mobile media
Because I don't need or care for a PDA.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
average people don't need all that stuff, plus they're not cool
Unless you sprung for extra storage, the space on your PDA is measured in tens of megabytes. On an iPod, it's measured in tens of gigabytes.
It is the poor marketing, bad media apps, public perception, or do people simply not want an all-in-one for mobile media?
iPod is just a glorified HDD which makes it important. Your PDA is a teeny weeny computer which makes it not-so-important. Plus,what is the biggest HDD you can put in it? Apple understands the low-profile-market better
yeah, but does your PocketPC run Linux?
Most people just want to listen to music. Also show me a PDA with a 60GB drive.
Clue #1: Cellphones have become PDAs.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
My take on why PDA's haven't been as succesful as the "ipod" - its the interface. Apple got that bit right and it became a hit.
Why do people not want a PDA in the ipod era?
Because music is more enjoyable than calendars and phonebooks...
Seriously, though, why should I have all these little devices which pretty much look the same (small rectangle, litle screen, buttons) but do separate things? For example, my cell phone has a keypad and an infrared port--why do I need a separate remote control for my TV (and VCR, DVD, stereo, etc...)???
In terms of mobility, how many pockets do I wish to designate for technology? I still need to store my keys, wallet, and, uh, well, at least for now I do...
storage constraints for one thing. my sx66 is a little more expensive than the iPod video, but has essentially no native storage. i shudder to think how much it would cost to upgrade my PDA's storage capacity to equal even that of a iPod nano.
iPods are sexy. PDAs are nerdy.
It is all about easy of use. Look at why people pay so much more for the iPod. iPods are intuitive. People don't want to click on start bars and launch applications and navigate to files. Look at the black berry. it is the same thing easy to access e-mail and that is all that people use it for. Even for many technically savvy people the simplicity of the iPod wins out over many of the other devices.
Some of these questions are answered here, in an editorial posted last night.
I have a 40GB iPod and a Sony NX70V Clie PDA. The iPod is a much better mp3 player than the Clie ever could be because the interface was designed for it. I have never even bothered to attempt to play an mp3 file on my Clie.
Actually, I started to once but then read that it only plays mp3 files if they are stored on a special memory stick that has DRM built into it and costs 2x more.
I am perfectly happy ignoring the fact that the headphone jack on my PDA even exists.
I tried a PDA about three years ago, but I found that it was difficult to carry it and my phone in my pocket. As a result, when my PDA died, I bought a phone that contained my desired PDA functionality. Later, when I needed a portable music player, I bought a Nomad, which doesn't stay in my pocket all day. Someday when WiMax is widespread, I hope to replace both devices with a single handheld computer that can access Rhapsody and Skype.
No, I will not work for your startup
Maybe because there aren't any $350.00 PDAs with 30 gig hds?
I love my T-mobile HP Pocket PC Phone, the h6315.
/. posts while pumping MP3's and keeping my work orders active.
GSM Phone, 4K GPRS, WiFi, Bluetooth. RSS grabber, 2 browsers, FTP, VNC client, Excel, Word, AIM, Shoutcast (32kbps & under), MP3&Video (6 hours of TV on my SD card), etc.
Battery life sucks but I have a micro charger. Interface is complex but I do 100% of my
My broad has an iPod mini. Simple. My luddite dad has one. My little sis has one.
PDAs do too much, for too short a charge life, and it takes too long to get it right!
Most MP3 players fail as the interface is too geeky.
I use a pda daily - I would never buy an Ipod.
I also have a camera - not a camera phone.
I need storage for the camera, that doubles for storage for the pda.
If people saw past the advertising - they'd realize they were getting ripped off for a shaped piece of plastic.
So - I'll say it's more because folks are stupid, and buy into advertising hype over functionality.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Let's compare it to the products it's supposed to replace, here's why I'm not using a PDA:
The calendar - I don't want to power up my PDA, flip through tiny menus with a stylus, it should be easy to access and I don't want to go several hundred dollars back if I lose it. On the other hand there's the synchronization, if I only got it to sync with my iPod and Nokia, that is.
mp3 player - No PDA holds 20 GB of music, nor are they pretty to look at or light enough to hang around your neck when you decide to hit the running track.
Cell phone - Too big.
Portable browser - fine, but the cell phones are getting closer, my latest cell phone isn't even restricted to WAP sites, unlike my last one...
They are too big to be an mp3 player (ask any athlete), and generally don't come with enough storage for allot of mp3s.
On the flip side, the lack of built in keyboard makes it tough to be an effective organizer for the masses, and lets face it, the web browsers suck for surfing the web.
They have failed because they aren't good enough yet. The PDA phones are getting there, mobile 5 is pretty good, rim does a good job too. But PDA and mp3 players really shouldn't be compared, they are worlds apart.
I like PDA's, don't have one but I like them. Big problem is they have all this funcionality, but don't have decent storage for it. Also I'd rather have a PDA not locked to a OS, or had a F/OSS OS like linux on it so I can screw around with it if I wanted too, the whole it runs with what we put on it BS is for the birds. Not meant to provoke flamewars, just IMHO
NO~, I read Slashdot because I think it's stupid.....
I've never sought out all for one convergence.
There's a variety of reasons for this.
1. I don't work in a traditional office setting with meetings and appointments.
2. There's compromises that are made on the portability and "all in one" nature of these devices. The camera feature on an older PDA wouldn't have met my needs for what I had at the time. Do I want to limit myself to 512MB of space for everything? These are questions I evaluated before I made my purchases. The cell phone served it's purpose, the ipod does it's own. I can't see much need in crossover for what I use the two for.
There are cell phones and watches [Datalink by Timex and MSoft] that are more useful as personal data storage devices, than most PDAs.
My personal system is to put highly dynamic or temporary data onto tiny scraps of paper that go into a special pocket in my pants, and my long term numbers and names are stored in my nifty Datalink wrist watch. I don't have a cell, but if I did, I could take notes with that. IF I had an MP3 player, I'd have an FM radio for new data, and MP3s to listen to. If it could be used to store other data files from a USB port, that would be even better.
I am waiting for the first James Bond cell phone wrist watch, with a camera, data input/retrieval, wireless web surfing, and of course a stopwatch. I think battery technology is all that is holding this device away from the assembly line.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
iPods have exponentially more space and are just more accessible to the general populace, for sexiness factor and the iTunes interface.
Name me one PDA that has 30GB of space. Or 10... or 5 even?
I've got a treo. It's a nice phone/organizer and it'd suck donkeys for playing mp3's. Why? Because it has no storage space.
I think, quite honestly, it comes down to a decision about the intention of the devices. PDA's are marketed to business people. So part of that marketing choice involves trimming out features that would make them well suited to being mp3 players. Why does a business traveller need 10GB of space? It'd be nice, but in the grand scheme, they don't need it and they wouldn't be able to convince their employers to shell out for it.
The other thing to keep in mind is the costs involved. An IPod is basically a disk drive with a very minimal interface to manage the music. Simple input and simple output using relatively low cost parts. If you tried to build a PDA with similar capacity it'd get a lot more expensive quickly and then who would buy it? Business execs would compare it to a blackberry and think it overpriced. Consumers would compare it to an ipod and think it overpriced.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
To paraphrase an old adage:
Unlike the iPod, "PDA's are so well-rounded that they're not going anywhere"
I've seen users justify a PDA to be connected, do business, and be compatible
with their computer environment. Then they end up just playing games or MP3s.
Because laptops have 90% of the function of a PC and they run on the stuff that people already know (MAC OS and Win XP). The only thing a PDA has on a laptop is size, and even then size can work against PDA's because it's easier to type on a bigger keyboard and look at a bigger screen that all laptops have...
Like everyone else has said, PDAs don't make good portable media devices because they're too big, don't have enough storage space, and are usually somewhat lacking in terms of battery life.
But we're all geeks here... why choose? I've got a PDA, camera phone, digital camera, laptop, and an iPod. It's a lot of gear so I obviously can't take it all everywhere... which means I do need to sacrifice certain functionality sometimes... but it also means that if I know ahead of time what I need, I can pick the device best suited for the job.
The last PDA I bought was a Palm T3 to replace my Treo 300 that I was furious at sprint with because the flip top lid thing snapped off after about eight months of use and the prick told me it was misuse. I am 'careful' with my devices and being told I chucked it at a wall in hopes of an upgrade really made my day.
Anyway, a PDA while decent to do lots of stuff, it doesn't do lots of stuff well.
There are things out there to improve the experience, but most of the time they cost money.
A iPod works out of the box, you don't have to jiggle here, tweak there, poke here. That's why the Pocket Windows devices appeal more to geeks but not to the rest of the world. On a lot of things I want them to Just Work (TM) and it seems when there is a device out there that 'does more stuff and costs the same' it doesn't Just Work(TM) you gott a dick with it. I don't get paid to dick with little devices to listen to music or look up my calendar so I'm not gonna waste my time and look for something that just works (TM)
My $0.02
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
You have more pocketable PPCs with phone functionality which are more useful (they can download email on the move). Plus you have smartphones which aren't much bigger and sometimes the same size as ordinary phones.
Having one do-all device is the best in my opinion. People love the idea of carrying 20GB of music with then, but I imagine that a very very small percentage of people actually make use of so much space.
I've found that 512MB in my cell phone holds more than enough music to keep me happy. Have't touched the iPod in almost a year. Everyone carries a cellphone, so why not make good use of it instead of buying a separate device?
I would agree with the submitter. I love my PDA. I can look view/send email, look at websites, take notes/contact/other data, view and edit document, etc. I can't see why people bitch so much about touch screens, and then go and use a little tiny screen on a cell phone that you have to control by just using a couple buttons. I can play music and videos on my PPC. I don't really see who would need 60 gigs of storage for just music. I mean, if you have that many songs, you might as well listen to the radio(disregarding sound quality, which personally isn't worth $400 or whatever iPods cost).
While not totally related to the subject, Palm just released a new PDA. It actually looks rather nice for them, it has bluetooth and wifi and isn't hideously expensive. If only they had this before I got my PocketPC, which doesn't easily-is a royal pain in the ass- sync with Linux, I really would have considered this. Maybe Palm has a little hope left.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
I have a Treo 650. It's a phone, it's a PDA, it's a pretty good MP3 player, it's a pretty good games machine to pass the time when I'm bored travelling and it's power-efficient too (and has a removable battery). All in a small form factor.
People who make generic statements such as "PDAs have failed" are just simply wrong.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Size. iPods and other mp3 players are significantly smaller and/or sleeker looking.
carrying around a one pound brick and surfing the net while you wait in the middle of the subway station. People with iPods want to bring music with them. People with PDAs want to bring work with them. Who would you rather hang around? (Forgetting that 'neither' is probably the best answer, I mean.)
My parents have often asked if I needed a Pocket PC. Invariably, my answer is always "no." I thought about it for 5 minutes of why I said "no" upon reading this article. I have come up with reasons (BTW, I have an iPod):
1. No use. I have a laptop, a desktop, a cellphone, and iPod. The laptop and desktop are meant to be ubquitous devices. They handle anything I throw at it. The iPod is for use for my huge music library (50 Gigabytes). No PocketPC could handle that. And my cell-phone is my phonebook.
2. Price. A PocketPC is around the price of an iPod. However, why didn't I buy a PocketPC instead of an iPod? Simple. Refer back to reason 1. I have no use for a PocketPC. I have no need to addictively log on to Technorati, Digg, or Slashdot. Also, checking e-mail every 5 minutes gets old. To me, the PocketPC doesn't do any one factor well. The iPod does music extremely well. What does the PocketPC do well? Organization? Well, between the back of my hand, my memory, and my pen and paper, I do got that base covered.
3. Price of Internet. Lets assume I'm not near any unsecured WiFi hotspot. To utilize the expensive brick I just bought to the max, I would have to get online. Well... T-Mobile Internet is $20 a month for abysmally slow Internet. Also, why would I connect using a PocketPC when my cellphone connects to the Internet just as fast and just as well?
4. Lack of Apps. Lets face it, PocketPC's lack Apps. I put everything I need on my laptop. I owned a PocketPC before, it died, I didn't need a new one. But lack of apps really hounded it.
My views on improving the PocketPC.
1. Bigger hard-drive. Between my 80 Gig Laptop, my 73.4 + 2x250 HD's on my laptop, and my 60Gig iPod, the PocketPC suffers from suitable space.
2. Lack of Apps. With not enough users, developers are loathe to code for it.
3. Price. Clocking in at the price of my iPod and considering how little I would never considering dropping the cash.
1) battery life
Your average iPod will play for 10 hours on a charge. You average PDA is lucky to last one hour. Putting the MP3 decoding in hardware is a huge battery saver. Although keeping it in software adds OGG support.
2) crash!
In the event that you didn't know #1, and your battery drains, those Pocket PCs have a nasty habit of deleting every file they can find.
3) effortless synch
With a PDA you have to manually move folders of MP3s over. Not much playlist support. The iPod with iTunes is effortless, especially with Party Shuffle.
Synching in general is my main gripe about my PDA. Its a royal pain in the ass to synch unless you use 100% microsoft, and it takes forever. No thanks. Palm is better on the Macs, but not by much. And considering problem #2, being able to quickly synch with many different apps and servers is VITAL.
Until somebody solves problem #3, Ive pretty much shelved my Axim. I use an iPod and a Hipster PDA instead. It wont synch, but neither will it crash.
Battery life, Simple to use, cost. Also most people enjoy listening to music, but PDA is work.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Truly a jack of all trades, master of none problem
The iPod is a focused device that does its original intent quite well. PDAs never did any of their information tasks very well, and considering a mini-laptop was far more useful and almost as portable, PDAs beyond address books (which a watch or phone does better now) never justified their 300-500 dollar price point.
I worked at a startup that chased enterprise apps on PDAs in the early 00s.
Developer tools sucked/expensive/closed, and the APIs changed constantly. MS does this junk on the desktop all the time with technologies, as in OLE->COM->DCOM->whatever, but can hide backwards compatibility in the OS bloat, but PDAs don't have room for backwards bloat. So no vibrant utilities or third-party apps really flourished. Palm wasn't much better, either.
I mean, try making an enterprise app for all the diffrent flavors of Palm+PocketPC. Jesus, it's like writing a 3D driving game for the NES, SNES, and Playstation2 all at once. Too expensive, and not enough money to be made.
Heck, processor architectures and fundamental OS capabilities (single-thread vs preemptive multitasking) changed constantly.
Battery life was always terrible, and if you ran out of battery, POOF! goes your installed apps and data (on the iPaq at least).
Finally, when I had to pay $150 for a damn PCMCIA sleeve for an iPaq that cost only $250, man, that is just WRONG. Any interesting thing you could do with it, from early WiFi or heck even wired networking went out the window with that.
So basically, the PDA market fragmented into dozens of minimarkets, where nothing could flourish. This was okay in the nascent PC market back in 1980 and you could release a computer with just BASIC interpreter and an extremely rudimentary OS, but people have far different expectations of applications (actual user interfaces, connectivity to internet, etc).
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
I have the ultimate PDA, a HP6315. 1 Gig of flash, T Mobile Phone, WiFi, BlueTooth, touch screen, the works. Problem is it just doesn't work and when it does it takes minutes of fiddling with. Then it crashes and forgets everything or the wireless goes haywire and won't connect. One day these things will be great but today my 60 Gig Ipod works fine and my HP PDA sits idle.
As the proud owner of a Nokia 3300(b) cell phone, I found myself wondering almost the same thing recently. Cingular has started advertising a new phone line with mp3/itunes support as if it's a hot new item. My phone (which is over two years old now) has 512MB worth of mp3s in it, which sound great when played back via the nokia dbus earphones. It also features nice battery life, probably twelve hours of continuous mp3 playback. True, it doesn't have itunes support, but realistically would you rather have a phone you can hook up to your pc and transfer mp3s off of your hard drive, or one that you have to pay $.99 for every song?
:)
My phone also has a full keyboard, something I felt was a necessity for taking quick notes and because I'm a huge text message flirt. I'm wondering why this phone (the 3300) had such a small impact on the market when it's so feature rich? My guess would be the lack of any advertising done on its part. I do a lot of research before making any serious purchase, but I'm guessing the majority of America just buys whatever they see on tv most often, or perhaps most recently. Back when the 3300 came out those chintzy camera phones were all the rage and were getting all the tv airtime on commercials.
Maybe you should just consider yourself trendy and go around telling everybody you see with a video ipod "I could do that two years ago!"
...usability.
Can any palm-top computer reach the ease of use of an ipod, or any other portable media player? I have a Palm Tungsten T5, and it surely is more difficult to use, even when I'm just running the Real music player.
It doesn't help that ipods mostly are measured in gigabytes, not megabytes.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
The iPod is successful for two reasons: ease of use, quality
That's something lacking on most PDA's. Palm OS was great, has become patchzilla with about a billion things bolted on that old OS, and the new version is still vaporware. Microsoft on the other hand, released a complex, ugly looking OS that makes that tiny screen feel way to overwhelming.
As far as quality goes... well think about it. The Treo isn't bad, but has it's downsides, those cheap Dell PDA's are just that, cheap.
For there to be a winner, someone has to do what Apple did. Combine killer features, and quality with ease of use.
Palm had that formula for a while, but dropped the ball a few years ago. Sony picked up the hardware side with the Clie, which I still carry around. As far as the software goes... it never came back.
I'm still waiting for my new Apple PDA.
At least that's what the marketing weenies tell us. Simply put, PDA's ain't chic. Once the iPod fad fades (in a little less than a year if you're the betting type), their sales will stabilize and then generally decline. That's the difference between a trend and a fad. I think mp3 players are a trend, iPods, a fad. Not that anyone, save slashdot, asked...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
No but my iPod does: http://ipodlinux.sourceforge.net/index.shtml ...well, at least sometimes.
It's the memory and proprietary formats. I have lost my data 3 times when a pda battery goes dies. with proprietary formats on windows ce or palm the files are hard to move back and forth and use in both places. I won't use one for anything important untill they have non volatile memory, and I can run any software I want on it.
-John Fenley
...at least, not in big enough numbers to make it worthwhile to make them.
Jeff Kirvin talks about this in the latest entry in his Writing On Your Palm blog. He points out that companies like Toshiba, Sony, and HP who used to make all these high-end super-geek-toy PDAs--the "Ferarris of handhelds"--are now either out of the PDA industry altogether, or at least having a hard time keeping up. Whereas Palm, who makes "Toyotas," just keeps on ticking.
Apparently there just isn't a market for a super-duper-gee-whiz-does-everything PDA at this point.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
The fact of the matter is that there are very few people who really need PDA's. If they can get a phone that has PDA features without paying a lot more, they'll take it. But as a standalone device, the PDA is the jack of all trades master of none.
If you take a straight up pocket PC, you can:
-Make phone calls
-Listen to music
-Schedule appointments
-Send e-mail
-Watch movies
But how many of those tasks is it really exceptional at? It's great for keeping track of a calendar and corporations are the biggest buyer of PDA's for that reason. They set up a centralized meeting system and then hand out PDA's to everybody.
It's not ideal for phone calls. I have a treo which is about as good of a compromise as you can get it and it's still a bit bulky for the average person. It'll fit in a pocket but it bulges quite a bit. You can listen to music but then you have storage space issues and the interfaces aren't nearly as good as what's on an ipod. You can send a small e-mail with ease but you need a laptop for real productivity. Movies... well, if you like watching movies on a 2 inch screen, more power to you and your optometrist.
The niche that a PDA is trying to fill is deceptively difficult. Basically give people a computer that they can carry in their pocket all the time. There's practical limitations to how small you can make the display and keyboard before it becomes unusuable. The treo is the best compromise I've seen and by most phone standards it's huge.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Because more functionality isn't aways better, especially in a smaller device.
You might as well be asking why people buy screwdrivers and pliers instead of a single Leathermen.
as simple as it sounds, Parent has hit the nail on the head.
When I was buying a PDA, I wanted to have a 30 Gig HD... I couldn't find one (the Palm HD edition PDA wasn't out yet).
I ended up purchasing a PDA and then an MP3 Player (not an iPOD, a Neuros if ur interested).
Another thing is simplicity and ease of use. The iPOD does what it was meant to do and does it with relative ease.
The next thing is form factor,size, look and feel.
I have a Dell Axim x50, its looks pretty and isn't as bulky as the other PDA's that are out, but it can't compare to the form factor of an iPOD.
From a sleeping iPod, it takes me two button presses to get music, a couple more with a swish on the wheel to pick a particular album. How many on a multifunction device?
Multifunctional devices are hard to design a good UI for.
Single function devices can be designed with a much more focussed UI which makes the common functions much easier to access.
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
PDAs are basically too hard to use. My Treo 650 is a marvelous device. It has 2 GB flash storage -- enough for hundreds of songs or a few movies -- that is swappable. I just don't believe the procedure for loading it with material is convenient enough to go mainstream with people.
The iPod sells because people do want portable entertainment. PDAs are too much work and remind people too much of work. Personally, I love my Psion 5mx but its obvious that I am part of an economically unsustainable niche market.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The technology for ventures centered upon open-source CMS & DRM is all there as outlined at authena.org--RDF/RSS for rights definitions; http and REST web services for content transfer, rights negotiation, and syndication; SSL, PGP, Media-S, and OPENIPMP for encryption and security; bit torrent for accelerated downloads, and LAMP applications such as postnuke, phpnuke, xoops, oscommerce, and netjuke for media browsing, buying, serving, and viewing. Surf's up, but there's nothing to surf it with.
A 22surfboard will be an all-in-one handheld device that holds books, movies, and more. It will readily run standard Linux distros, including RedHat, Suse, and Gentoo. Designed with the Linux-Apache-MYSQL-PHP (LAMP) developer community in mind, it will inherit the vast power of the sourceforge LAMP community who are hungry for a true Linux handheld/media-device to hack.
http://22surfboard.com/
I've been using an i-mate for the past three weeks - the best thing about it is accessing the web via GPRS. The phone is dumb, the camera pathetic. However if I had the $ I'd get one BUT for the cost per kb charged by Telstra. That's the sticking point for pda's in Australia.
"Price" element -- You can buy the cheapest iPod for $99 with 512MB storage, but the $99 model PDA (Palm Z22) holds only 32MB data and can barely do anything.
"Play" element -- Nobody associates PDA with "play", while iPod is all about having fun.
Sun and Fun
For the price of a decent PDA, you can get MP3 player with at least an order of magnitude more storage space.
I own an iPod. I don't keep a lifestyle which requires me to carry a device to help me remember stuff.
I don't sign contracts which make me on call after I leave work.
If people saw past the advertising, they would realise they were not free. These PDA devices are tools of enslavement.
You keep your chains and PDAs, I'll keep my iPod, its a great environment isolation device.
Charles Winchester (sp?) on MASH would say "I do one thing at a time. I do it very well. And then I move on."
Although PDAs are cool and nifty doing a bunch of things, they don't do anything well. Dayplanners are easier to take notes and schedule day-to-day tasks. Watches are better for telling time. Jump drives are easier to mobile storage. Ipods have more storage, simpler interface and better sound quality for music. Laptops are better for internet communication and business applications.
I think most people just want the best tool for the job and not extra tools they don't need.
lexbaby
"Be Brave, Be Loyal, Be True." -- Hawkeye Pierce
the user interface on my palm treo 650 sucks ass compared to my ipod. Yes, I know they do very differnt things. I would much rather use my ipod than my treo any day.
I'm using a Pocket PC. It fails quite often, causing me to restore all the data that was lost from the flash memory (luckily there's a nice program that helps all this). Buying/downloading software is a pain as there are multiple chipsets one has to deal with (ARM, MIPS, etc.). I, for one, have installed a lot of things on it to the point that it has become a large part of my life and extremely useful. I don't imagine the average user wanting to deal with all this, though. I believe to make a dent in the market, one would actually have to sell a PDA with a lot of useful stuff already installed. Also, this thing would have to take a beating. I'm sure iPods are dropped all over the place, yet they continue working. I see people complain in droves when there's a scratch. My PDA has died and I had to find a replacement battery and replace it myself and my screen looks like shit, but I still keep with it. I imagine if the iPod suffered the same problems, it would not sell like it does now.
Hey it is funny. At least it is different from "first post".
I think it's ignorance and marketing.
I've a Treo 650. I'd never buy an ipod, but my Treo is a phone, a remote control, a calender, an organizer, a document reader, an mp3/wma reader that can sync with rhapsody, napster, itunes, etc, I can watch movies, browse the web, use AIM, YAHOO, and MSN Messenger, I can take pictures and I can take video.
Does it do all that the BEST? Nah. But I can put a gig of memory on it which is more than enough for how much music I ever really want with me. But it's the best device I ever owned and has proved itself to be quite amazing.
A PDA has been my constant companion since my Psion 3a in 1993, and I've since moved through Palms and Treos to my current Treo 650. The Treo has abilities my poor little Psion would never have dreamed of, and despite a much better user interface, is just as complex to use overall because of it. It is about as complex as a modern PC or Macintosh, just as my Psion was about as complex as PCs or Macs were back in 1993. I happen to be comfortable with this, and it seems the original poster of the question is too.
The iPod I carry around in my bag is about as simple to use as the cassete tape-playing Walkman I had in High school, in spite of the fact that it has far more abilties than that Walkman ever had. That lowers the barriers to ownership right there.
Then toss in the "cool factor" that comes with each iPod, and contrast that to the "nerd factor" that comes with every PDA, and it is soon clear why there are a few billion more iPods than PDAs out there.
The Pda isn't trendy. People don't just buy an iPod because it is a good mp3 player, but also because they are in. the iPod is no better than lots of other portable mp3 players, many of which are cheaper or have extra feaures (voicd mp3 encoder, FM radio and no DRM). The iPod is "cool" and the PDA isn't. Goodbuy Karma, but it sooooo true
If it's dead, you killed it.
It's a matter of style. Back in the day, Sony made some great looking Clies, which somehow transmogrified into bizzare TransformerBot-like devices.
Most iPaqs and Dells and whatnot are about as sexy as a pair of fat-ass Docker chinos, which is usually what they're tethered to by way of an obscenely mooky clip-on case.
The last several years' worth of Palm's have been absolutely uninspired, and yes, even in person. The LifeDrive comes close, but...well...we all know that "close" doesn't convert into market share.
I, for one, would welcome our new sexy PDA overlords, if only they would come!
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
Most cell phones have adaquate contact managers. Note that I didn't say great, just functional enough for most of us to stumble through our days. Most email clients have good enough contact managers, at least for keeping track of email addresses. The big deal with most of the pocket pc type devices is that they can hotsync with Outlook. However, many people who want that functionality either can't get it from the IT folks, or have it on the crackberries (not to mention that most people can't figure out that they have their own address book, and don't have to wade through the global address list). I used my Pocket PC for several applications, mostly note taking (difficult to not possible), contact management (linked to outlook), and MP3 playback for a long while, but I finally gave up due to too much duplication, and a new job that didn't require as much contact management. I used it for mp3s for a while after that, but finally bought a dedicated player because the playback quality was so terrible. The sound had no low end at all (but it was in stereo, much to my amazement), and the interface (MS media player) was unuseable while driving, walking or anytime you couldn't use the stylus to hit the very small on screen buttons.
The other problem I found is that I would see an application I may want to use, but not want to pay the $25+ registration fee. This was usually for something that I thought would be neat, but not essential. The essential stuff was much more. I don't know if there was a MS tax on all software developed for the Pocket PC, or the programmers all think they deserve to be mulit millionares just because they wrote a widget application, but it was a big let down after seeing the great hardware (toshiba). Oh yea, web browsing sux too!
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Also Apple has turned their ipods from mp3 players into fashion accesaryies. Even though there are other mp3 players that either have higher sound quality, better support for more filetypes, better music store selection, more storage (HD) for comparable price, a significantly longer battery life, simply cheaper and/or a combination of the previous apple's ipod consistently sells more than any other brand. Furthermore I've never heard of a celeb having a diamond studded Rio Karma although they have done that to ipods reinforcing it's use as a fashion statement.
Also stupid school districts are encouraging it's use in foreign language classes and in some cases are requiring it (though it may be provided by the school). The use of the ipod in this way is that the students record on it and play it back to themselves/the teacher to improve their pronounceation. WTF?! That can be done on a simple tape recorder which is a lot cheaper than $200.
Now before I get lots of flames, I'm not saying the ipod is a bad product, because it is not. However it's popularity is in now way a reflection of it's quality.
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
I agree. Both the interface to the iPod itself AND the iTunes interface.
Rip a CD straight to your iPod with a single click.
Buy an album or a song straight to your iPod with a single click.
So simple. Almost nothing to learn - you don't need to know about MP3s or ripping onto your PC first and then transferring to your player. It's all integrated - very consumer-friendly.
You don't need to be a nerd to use it.
He used to talk about how gadget-happy folks would buy electric motors for the kitchen. When I was a kid we had one: it was a motor mounted in the kitchen counter, and it came with all sorts of attachments - the blender attachment, the mixer attachment, the chopper attachment. Very easy to use, quite powerful. In those days (early 1970s I guess) there was a competition between built-in motor manufacturers for whose was the most reliable, whose was the most powerful, etc.
When's the last time you bought a motor for your kitchen? I have lots of appliances but no lone motors.
The IPOD vs PDA thing bears out Don's prescient thinking: people don't want computers, we want applications. We buy the computers to get the applications, and when the applications are well enough developed we won't bother buying a "computer" at all.
Palm failed by getting stuff onto the market too late and with too high a price. The Treo 650 should have been on the market 3 years ago for $200. I might buy a used one in a few years, buy that's not going to help Palm.
It's just one more expensive thing to fuck with that I don't need.
Tools are supposed to make your life easier, not just make more work.
Cell phones have all the important features of PDAs.
All the PDA's I've seen are too big to comfortably carry in my pocket. I am NOT going down the bat belt path - they are uncomfortable, and I'm a geek, not a dork. If I can't take it with me everywhere then it's useless.
The Nokia E70 looks like a truly killer smartphone. It has a full keyboard, 352 x 416 screen, 3G AND WLAN network connectivity, a 2 megapixel camera, and miniSD card compatibility. And it's no bigger than my current phone.
I've got a Clie TJ-37 which is capable of playing mp3s and video (via mmplayer) both of which I have got running in the past. The limitation is not really one of memory but of battery life. Playing MP3s or worse yet, video will drain the batteries in less than an hour. While I love my Clie as a PDA and eBook Reader, it blows as a media player.
When I want a portable media player I grab my Gameboy (DS or micro)with a Play Yan which has an insane battery life (5hrs plus w/ video) and great compression (4-5hrs on a 1 GB flash) and is well nigh indestructable. Beats the hell out of the iPod and beats my PSP on battery life. I even hear you can play video games on it.
Finally PDAs get no love. Every time a PDA topic comes up, everybody on slashdot becomes a luddite insisting that a 3x5 index card and a pencil outperforms a PDA (try GPS mapping with that guys !). On the other hand Apple generates slavish devotion, even with very mediocre products.
I figured this out a few years ago while watching IPods grow. I bought my first PDA with playing music in mind. I quickly found a few problems: PDA's don't have HDD's at all (Already said) Volume control SUCKS!!! With headphones on, the lowest setting was yelling in my ears. However there are some features in my PDA that I love and I won't buy an mp3 player until they are included: SD disks, really easy file transfers, back up your camera on a HDD. WiFi, expecially with city wide coverage, streaming internet radio on the go is becoming a reality. File browser, I don't sort my songs by genra, but instead by what folder they are in. Replaceable battery, I'm ok with a 4 hour battery life as long as I can switch out the battery for a fresh one.
...since both the palm lifedrive and the zaurus c3000 and c3100 have 4gb of built in storage
A computer is a tool, but I am not. I use Linux
I think nowadays a PDA would have to be marked as a kickass mp3 player that play video, download wirelessly from your computer (wifi), play through the wireless headset (bluetooth), give you directions (gps), and it would all have to just work. Additionally it would need to have a simple, sexy interface. Plus it would need storage comparable to a similarly priced ipod.
PDAs are thought of as hamstrung computers that are hard to use, rarely ever work right, and are in no way 'cool'. Additionallyy they will now be seen as low storage MP3 Players. Their features really make them the next step. All the things mentioned from a wireless phone to a video/music player are highly marketable, the competition is just harder now that IPods have taken off.
I do security
because i have only one hand free. and i don't need to even look at the screen to get to the song that i want. it's getting back to the magic word "UI". but it's also related to how mobile you wanna be vs what kind of task you wanna do with a mobile device.
for other tasks, i'll use my laptop.
Software.
Software.
Software.
Oh and storage.
Apple's iTunes software and their iTunes Music Store are the primary reasons why the iPod outsells PDAs and other media players, hands down. People have invested tons of money into their music collections over iTMS and have sort of screwed themselves into getting locked into Apple's system (speaking from personal experience). I know I could just burn all my stuff into discs and re-import, but the hallmark of Apple's is that their ease of use encourages happy laziness. So forget that.
Also, all I have in my Zire is a 1 gig CF card. Sure, it can hold a couple of feature-length movies, but my iPod holds all the music I own with a much better interface than the RealOne player on my Palm.
If Palm joined up with Apple and combined the LifeDrive concept with iTunes and iTMS, it'll be all over. But because Apple is already on top of the market, don't count on them making that move.
Give me a PDA with the storage capacity and connectivity of an iPod and I'll think about one. You know, a PDA that you can just plug in with a USB2 or Firewire connector, that doesn't have to mangle all the documents you store on it, or go though some ugly synchronize program. That would be swell.
planet texture maps and more
I think it's that people dont like using pcs. They don't like using windows, they dont like opening and closings apps, they get headaches when doing stuff other than internet on computers. So why would they want to carry one around with them everywhere?
iPods and phones on the otherhand, do not give them headaches, but rather they delight them by simply letting them talk to their friends more easily and listen to good music easily. I think the other features are primarily seen as icing on the cake.
I wouldn't consider current PDAs media devices. Sure, they're capable of video and audio playback, and with my 1GB storage card, I can store longer movies on them, but the battery life isn't that great, and PDAs aren't really good at running for prolonged periods of time. PDAs are cool and stuff (or maybe not, since most don't come with white headphones), but they're mostly not designed to be "uber multimedia devices" that can be used like harddrive MP3 player. It's like TV tuner cards for PCs - you can use them to watch TV, and some people actually do, but most people will stick with their dedicated TV watching device.
This is a sig. It is appended to the end of comments I post.
I usd to travel a lot with work, and there is nothing more lonely than being stuck in a hotel room with nothihng to do. I ended up carrying round half my luggage as books til I bought a PDA and started buying electronic versions of books - now I have a complete library with me wherever I go.
MP3 players - yeah I can do that if I want to - syncing calendar and working emails - I had a laptop to do that. But having over a hundred books to read on a device half the size and weight of a paperback is still priceless to me - and on top of that I never lose my page
If you want to give an e-book a try - check out the BAEN website and look for the free library - some great books there for free download (full versions). And no - I am in no way affiliated with BAEN - I just respect the fact that they are using the internet to help you have a chance to try out some authors.
People do want an all-in-one, measured by the hype seen on /. But hand-held video and music is old news. I am the very happy owner of an iPAQ 4155 which is almost two years old. It foremost has WiFi and a full-featured IE, email, yada-yada. I've been watching feature-length movies for some time now, using DVD-2-PocketPC to rip them to an appropriate file size. And a 2GB SD card is plenty of space for a few movies and all the music you can listen to for days.
There are only two reasons to get a PDA:
1) Because they are Cool and you can show off... This fades FAST... Fads are not really a good business model.
2) Because you have a high-pressure or high-travel related job. In other words, you NEED all those tiny portable productivity features to stay employed. For this case, a PDA is more of shackle than a gadget. After a while, most people would love to be able to shred the PDA and go back to a normal job. So in this case, you really are not going to buy PDAs for your kids are you?
IPods on the other hand are ONLY bought because people wish to enjoy life with them. You can use at work, at home, wherever. They are pointed to a TOTALLY different and much much wider market than PDAs.
When I see someone with a PDA I have to wonder what kind of reason they would have to HAVE to use that tiny device for business.... Does that PDA simplify their life or does it introduce far too much complexity and expecatations or superiors?
When I see someone with an MP3 player, I see someone that has found a way to mix work with fun. Its a pretty good compromise.
Which person do you really want to be?
GSG
I had the same reaction about video Ipods and responded to a post saying roughly the same thing a few days ago. They may lack the memory but I expanded mine to 1 gig and the storage is potentially unlimited by swaping cards, something you can't do with Ipods. Eventually the memory cards will match current Ipods for storage. Just how many songs do you need to store? Video is a bigger issue but you can already store two movies on a 1 gig memory card so you can keep movies on cards much like DVDs. I find I use all the features on my PDA constantly. My Zaire has built in sound, camera and video capibilites as well. I can play movies, listen to music or read a book on it. I got stuck somewhere right after I got it with nothing to do and found it even had a built in copy of Last of the Mohicans so I killed some time reading it. The biggest issues they have are limited memory and battery life. I've yet to use up my memory so it's not an issue but for longer video clips the battery life isn't up to the task. The one thing I'd love to have is an external battery pack. That one thing would make playing movies practical.
also, lack of a stupid fruit logo on said all-in-one device... BINGO.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
PDAs are viewed as electronic versions of a traditional paper organizer.
Sure, they can do a hell of a lot more than that, but those extra things aren't what people think of when they hear "PDA"
that has more than a few megabites of storage without adding an additional flash card.
With the addition of a 512mb sd card and 'aeroplayer' software, my Palm Tungsten made a fine mp3 player during travel... until my wife gave the gift of iPod, which was superior and durable enough of a player that it was worth adding to my travel kit.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I have owned a pocket pc for two years, and it sucks for usability. As a mp3 player it lacks space unless I buy expensive memory cards (extra $). For many of the features I have to guide any body who uses it through many levels of instructions (hard to use for even basic stuff). Whenever I have a girlfriend use it to help with directions they cant even figure out how to get the screen to scroll down or make the volume go up or down on the music...the design on these things is terrible...plus they crash and get slugish often forcing reboots. Ipods rarely have problems like this.
Palm organizers on the other hand have fewer of these issues, but still have text entry issues, are difficult for new users to figure out how to access programs and so on. Ipods are popular because any idiot can pick it up and begin enjoying it without a degree in gadget-ometry. Also palm really needs a new advertising company, who ever is promoting their products should have been fired years ago, their totally inept and should be totally ashamed of themselves, they not only lost the lead in the handheld market, the handheld market has virtually disappeared!
For me the main issue is battery life. I can't speak for Pocket PCs, but Palm devices don't have removable batteries, and even a Tungsten T3.5 (see the Brighthand forums to learn what one of those is) only lats a maximum of 6 hours with the screen brightness at minumum. My iRiver can last many times that, and it uses a standard removable AA battery. If Palm devices had better battery life and removable batteries (e.g. allow the use of thicker, ultra-high-capacity batteries), then they might become a much more viable alternative. A Power To Go sled can add more life by recharging your Palm but they don't make them anymore, presumably because the new Palms don't use the Universal Connector. It also isn't all that great a solution -- a better alternative would be the cell-phone model where you simply swap batteries, and have choices of battery capacity.
In terms of battery life, currently the best Palm MP3 player would be a Tungsten T2.5 (T2 with a Powerizer 1400MAh battery shoehorned in), which will give you 12 hours with screen brightness at minimum, but you have to perform serious surgery to get the battery in there (I've done it to a Tungsten T and it's not for the squeamish).
Probably for the same reason why a multi-function microwave isn't as popular (e.g. integrated toaster).
Thinking I might use such a thing, I bought a Palm M100 (the cheapest Palm out at the time) and played with it for a while. After four months I put it down and never picked it back up. After a few months I discovered that the AAA batteries in it had exploded and destroyed it. I never bothered to replace it. My work gave me a iPaq which I also tried to find a use for at work and failed misserably.
What I found out in the end is that PDAs do not do anything I need them to do. Data input is too cumbersome to be worth the effort and I don't really want or need anything else it does.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Right device, right time, right place..
I had a Palm III way back when. A simple setup like one computer at home, one at work and one PDA simply didn't work.
I knew people who worked for big companies and their staff would try to set up employees with PDAs.
During the synchronization, data either gets lost or truncated and the fields on the PDA never match the fields on your organizer.
Does your organizer support links between items? Forget it.
There was never a decent way to prioritize what info, for want of screen space and memory, should be copied to the PDA.
I know plenty of people got PDAs to work. More power to them. But I junked mine after a few missed deadlines and lost contacts.
Why get a PDA which does some of the functions of a real computer, when you can have a real computer? Things like:
http://www.dynamism.com/u50/
and:
http://www.oqo.com/
Small, fast (compared to a PDA), and plenty of storage. Better screens too.
Plus many of the PDAs are hampered with some shocking design decisions. I've had three PDAs, and all of them lost all data when both batteries go flat (Psion 3C, HP Jornada 620LX and Sony Clié PEG50). Forget to charge for two weeks, and you have - no data. Plain stupid. Flash isn't ruinously expensive, so there's no excuse IMO.
I don't know about the current crop of PDA's. I have a Palm IIIe which has been sitting in a draw for many many years. The reason why I put it in the draw was it really didn't do anything very well. Play games? Gameboy was better. Calendar? I didn't really need one, but when I did, I had a laptop. Notes/ToDo Lists? Data entry was a pain even though I could write in Grafitti better then I could with pen & paper. Contact List? One of the only reasons why I did use my Palm, but then data entry was a pain. Also, cellphone works better since I can lookup AND call on the same device. 2MB of RAM couldn't do much more...
Basically, I found it too cumbersome to use so I stopped using it.
I have an iPod and a PDA with wireless and 1gig SD card.
Storage Space and Battery time and 'real' buttons for music playing and browsing. Thats what the problem is.
Cheers.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I'll change one word to two words - drive space.
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
PDAs sales will continue to slump until it becomes as easy (or easier) to write on the !@#$! things as it is to jot down a number on a post-it note.
Handwriting recog is a bit of a joke isn't it?
It takes me maybe two minutes to find the damn thing in my kit, go through several screens and then get to the field that handles phone numbers and hope to high heaven that my "7"s don't turn into fives when I input it all in.
It takes me maybe 15 seconds to jot down a number on a piece of paper and cram it into my purse (whereupon it then takes me several hours to find it again but that's another story....)
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
the ipod is not just another mp3 player that does this and that. its an integral factor in the experience that u get when u combine it with itunes, the itunes music/video store, ical, adress book, iphoto, the sexy unique design and the ease of use of mac os x on a mac. its amazing how pc users are dealing with the lack of some stuff. (but hey...isnt that a miracle since 20 years?) "software drives the user experience"
The only reason Apple made a video iPod is the idea comes basically for free once you have the new nicer screens and a big harddrive sitting in the unit.
People who are looking at the video iPod as a validation of the demand for mobile video are mistaken.
99% of the people who wind up owning a video iPod are only ever going to use it to listen to music.
People most want to listen to enough different music that it's not always repeating. The iPod does this, and PDAs don't have the storage. That's the entire mass market for devices. The Walkman was, at the time, more popular than computers, and now the iPod is more popular than PDAs.
Now, PDAs are actually reasonably popular, because they're good for keeping track of certain stuff. But they haven't gotten any better at that in 5 years, and everybody who needs one has one, so there's not a big market for new devices.
A 3.5mm jack.
What was your username again? -BOFH
In almost every way...
It is the poor marketing, bad media apps, public perception, or do people simply not want an all-in-one for mobile media?" ?
Yes
Glad I could help
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
So the palm had a great balance, calendar, notes, addresses, maybe a little more but that's 85%.
PocketPC comes along, word, IE, blah blah blah.
Who's going to buy a palm pilot without all that shit that the pocketPC has now? Just do the geek math on that one. At the same time, pocketpcs are a terrible laptop replacement. Why not just carry the thinkpad or powerbook around? I see lot's of people with palmPCs and very few that really use them. They get bought for features that aren't used. Meanwhile, palm hit this on the years back.
iPods play music.
I have a Sharp Zaurus sl-6000l and it has none of the problems that wince and palm devices have. It runs linux and has a simple qtopia interface. My Grandfather can figure out how to play music on it unless I bring up a bash shell. It was designed so that unlike a palm device or wince device I can install software on it without having to have a pc. It has a vga 480x640 screen that I can watch movies on. And a 1500mAh battery that I can get most of 4 hours of constant use out of. Longer if I turn off the screen to play MP3's or OGG files. A month ago an elderly couple asked me if it was a video ipod. I told them it was better. The only thing wrong with it is the people who manufactured it. Sharp has no interest in selling zaurus in the USA. Microshaft or palm will sell you anything you are willing to pay for provided it syncs to a windows machine to do anything half-useful. But sharp wont fight the PDA stereotype(expensive and useless) by selling PDA's in the USA that dont cost themselves any money in OS license fees. IPOD = not as good as linux powered zaurus
How is this a ripoff?
Well, if you're buying 60gig drives for $320, obviously you can't spot a ripoff. I mean, you can get a 7200rpm one for $42. Or maybe you mean a laptop harddrive so that it can be small. Wait, that's $95. Ah, you said plug in to your computer, so I guess you mean a firewire drive. Darn, that's $75
I don't really have anything against ipods, and I do think they're probably worth the price (even though I use my pda for my music playing needs. I'll be the first to admit I'm not a huge music guy though). However, they're not the cheap device you're making them out to be, they are the expensive players of the market. After all, you could be buying a Nomad for $279 $229 with the rebate, but I refuse to count that as the actual price, I don't believe in rebates.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
A PDA can play MP3s, but it's fiddly to use, large and generally has shorter battery life. Try skipping a song forwards in Aerotunes without taking the Palm out of your pocket. There is also the generally poorer audio quality (in my experience, anyway). As most of the use of a video iPod will probably still be audio while traveling, that's a major problem.
The advantage of next-gen mobile devices is that everyone already carries a mobile around, so incremental increases in capability have an immediate market. It's much easier to sell someone a new mobile phone that allows them to browse the web as well than it is to sell them a whole new device to carry around.
Yes, you nailed it: "people simply do not want an all-in-one for mobile media" In virtually every product category, the focused device beats out the hybrid. It's too easy to make the focused device better for hybrids to compete effectively.
Why would anybody need 60 gigs of music. That's 85 full CDs
Even I own more than that. It's amazing what you can pick up at a pawn shop or garage sale. In fact, buying one CD every 3 weeks is not unusual for a member of one of those record clubs. As Compact Disc Digital Audio has been around for over two decades, a record club member might own 347 CDs.
on a device that doesn't even get 20 hours of battery life.
Some people are around AC outlets more often than they are around a computer to reload songs.
Not to mention the music is compressed, so you can fit tons more than that.
Some people claim to hear the artifacts in even LAME 256 kbps MP3, especially with classical music. Lossless compression can get only a 2:1 ratio. Taking this into account as well as the fact that most CDs don't have all 74 minutes filled, you're looking at about 300 MB per CD for lossless or 100 MB per CD for LAME at alt-preset-standard. Joe Columbia House's 347 CDs would compress to 104 GB if compressed losslessly or 34 GB if compressed with LAME APS.
But even at 10 minutes a disk to rip it
Which isn't so bad if you alt-tab to Slashdot or go watch prime-time TV while it's ripping. Break this 3470 minutes of ripping Joe Columbia House's collection into 2-hour sessions and you get 29 days to rip everything, which can be accomplished within a month.
it would take 166 days of straight ripping, no pauses to copy the music to the device.
Ripping 1000 CDs at 10 minutes each takes 10,000 minutes, or 7 straight days. Do it in 1-hour sessions, and yes, it does take 166 days.
Not to mention trying to find a song. I know the interface is good, but how well does it perform when you have 15000 songs to go through. How would you even find anything?
How does artist/album/title fail you?
I store a bunch of data that I use all the time in my PDA. I look at my ipod as more or less disposable (at least, reformat and reload if needed). I wouldn't want to have my PDA banging around in my pocket in the gym, with that pretty screen to get damaged. The ipod just seems more solid and durable for those types of situations.
I just bought my iPod nano. It can do with perfection everything a portable music player have to do: play music.
Some time ago I tried a PSP but found it an overkill for people like me that just want to hear a lot of music without recharging the battery and replacing a memory card every few hours.
Also, I wanted something I could just throw in my pocket and walk around. Have you ever tried something similar with a PDA/PSP? Notice that I have a Palm as well but it never leaves my desk/suitcase because it is plain clumsy. I mean, PDAs face a limit in terms of usability...
Sure you can find many all-in-one gadgets out there but virtually all of them cant even be compared to an iPod in terms of aesthetics, usability, and sound quality.
peace.
--ASRG
They lack the halo effect.
Its the iTunes stupid. (no /. reader is being called stupid BTW)
:) It is all just opinion. But the opinions that spend win. I have purchased 4 iPods at this point (originally I had an SSI America MP3 brick of a player). But a Lifedrive sized device with a SIM card slot 4 band cell ability and just require a wired or bluetooth headset. Add the existing LifeDrive PDA type apps, the QVGA screen, although real WVGA would be nicer and not affect the form factor too much, just make the controls soft onscreen controls. Add some better integration inside to make room for a 1.8 inch drive instead of the CF sized one and it would not make the device appreciably bigger than a current lifedrive. Use a small NAND flashdrive for the app and OS / boot device for speedy access and turn-on time. Voice call function for the cell phone would mean for the cell phone voice calls the brick sits in your pocket almost all the time. Just use the headset to initiate the calls. It is possible to build this now, technically. It may not be possible to get all the players needed to come to the table and license the technologies needed at a reasonable rate. I am pretty sure I could bring such a device to market (and I am available for consulting!) for less than the combined price of say a Lifedrive and premium (like a Razr or V635 or similar Nokia or other) cell phone. And save the cost of an iPod. Even paying a hefty fee to Apple per shipped unit for license of the iPod engineering and design. Any one want to hire my company to get it done??? :)
It is the iTMS and iTunes ease of use. And agressive marketing. If the Palm Life drive had a virtual cell phone keypad, GSM ability and the iTunes app, I'd buy one now. Right now. I have a large iTMS collection so want / need iPod-lite at a minimum iTunes ability (which I can get through JHymn and a genric player app). But the real iTunes app is just nice to me. It an opinion thing of course, but apparently shared by quite a few people. And, an 80 GB drive in a LifeDrive would be nice. Build in the equivalent of the camera connector and a portable iPhoto app and Palm could have a great product. Of course Palm has now aligned with the dark empire forces.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Clue #1: Cellphones have become PDAs.
Most prepaid mobile phones have not become PDAs, and not everybody at least in my part of the United States can afford $960 for a 2-year commitment.
Like my mom
Like my fiance
Like my neighbors
Like my neighbors children
Like George Bush
Like Queen Elizabeth
While PDA addresses a smaller market
Like that IT dork in our office
Like that middle manager wannabe
Like the ArsTechnica reader
Simple how you can be more successful addressing a larger market with a device that people can operate and enjoy!
I have an Asus MyPal. I used it back in uni as a media player and for taking notes. With a 256mb flash card I could store more than enough songs for the bus trip there and back. The hand writing recognition stuff meant I could write on the touchscreen with the stylus quite naturally. For those purposes, it was very handy.
Since I left uni, it has sat in a drawer somewhere, unused. I can't think of any use for it. I have a laptop for any real portable computing I do, which isn't much. I have a tiny phone and a small mp3 player. For day to day use, the pda is a little too large.
There isn't a killer app for PDA any more. I have been carrying one since I bought my Newton 130 in 1997. I love them. However there have been no significant developments in software since 2000. No decent applications and no real innovations coupled with a refusal of the industry to drop below $100 for basic models mean they have only been selling replacements for most of the last five years. MS is spending something like a billion a year and sales are still declining overall. It seems to be a cognitive dissonance. Some people like PDAs that do music, and some like music that does PDAs.
Ross Winn "not just another ugly face..."
I have a samsung SCH-i600 smartphone, and as many of you guys have said, PDA's are a jack of all trades, master of none, but pound for pound vs an iPod, i'd rather have my phone.
Granted the web broswer is sub-par at best, and it's not the greatest phone i've ever had (but also far from the worst) and its storage capacity is somewhat limited (the phone has like 8mb internal memory, but it does have an SD slot) however, I wish i knew why this phone was discontinued, as it's one of the few "smartphones" that's also a flip phone, and since to me, that's it's primary function, as a phone, I love it.
It's not as annoying to try and use like a treo or any of the other "full size" i guess you'd have to say, pda phones, and the sacrifice of some pda functionality i would actually does suck, but overall, it does everything i use it for: make phone calls, play music, RARE web browsing (usually enough to get my isp's phone number so i can rip someone a new one), has decent battery life, and unlike ALOT of smart phones i've seen, the battery is changeable. Keeping a fully charged "slim line" spare in my pocked and the extended life on the phone, its great.
My iPod does little more than sit in my car plugged into my 12 volt inverter and my cassette deck for music. and that's only because I'm too lazy to hook my phone into it.
Over the years I have had a Newton MessagePad (the best of all, IMHO), Palm III, Palm VII, and a Toshiba e710.
Every one of them (with the exception of the Newton) broke. The wireless in the Palm VII broke. Twice. The Toshiba kept hard resetting itself for no good reason, so I'd have to reload it again and again, then finally the battery gave out. So for now I've given up on PDA's
I don't have time for a porable tool like a PDA, phone or music player that doesn't just work, do what I want it to do, and do it well. That's why I love my iPod mini. It works well and does what I want it to do with a simple, clean interface and long battery life. I use it to store and play music, period. I keep basic contacts either in my phone or the appropriate email account.
While I'd love to have a single, unified device that brought together everything, I don't think it's possible right now to do that and have a reasonable form factor, battery life and user interface that was worth anything. I am happy having a phone separate from my music player.
Time is the quality of nature that keeps events from happening all at once. Lately it doesn't seem to be working. -Anon
I think part of the reason that nobody buys PDA's is that most people really don't understand them. Hell, my parents are still getting used to WindowsXP, and you really have to learn how PDA's work. For instance, I've had my Zire 72 for about 6 months, and I'm still getting used to the Grafiti2 system. IPods are popular because they're so EASY.
U.I.
An iPod is basically an entertainment device albeit with some limited productivity-oriented features ( Contacts/Addressbook). The PDA is more of a productivity-oriented device, and (to me) the cell phone is a basically a productivity device. I use the "how painful is it when it runs out of battery?" test to figure out which category a device falls into. I cannot see all the three ever being rolled into one device ( imagine running out of battery listening to songs and then realizing you need to make a phone call). So I would like to have ONE "productivity" device and ONE "entertainment" device. In my world, my iPod would have my music, video, and (yes!) games. And my cellphone would have my addressbook/calendar/email etc. However, since most carriers/cellphone manufacturers do not provide an open or elegant interface to pull in the addressbook/calendar information into a phone, people with complex schedules and large addressbooks are basically stuck carrying all three. ( Yes, the Blackberry changed some of that, and I know that you can get sync your phone using bluetooth/ugly cables etc ..)
In the future, mobile phones will likely provide better "integration" of the productivity features such as addressbook / calendar / simple applications for order taking etc etc. But I never see them being used as an "entertainment device" ( due to the "running out of battery" issue) - that need will always
be fullfilled by stand-alone devices.
In either case, the PDA is dead ... and that is the trend that we see ..
Denial is not a river in Egypt
I can only speak for myself, but... I had a Sony Clie a couple years back. It was really cool, but I found that, after a few days, I was basically just using it to play Bejeweled on the train.
I quickly found out that I don't need most of what a PDA offers. I like having a portable calendar, but I pretty much never need the ability to add appointments on the fly - so my cell phone or iPod do this exactly as well (thanks to iSync). I have a laptop, and would rather view Word/Excel documents on there than on a tiny screen. And the address book? Again, iSync puts this on my phone and iPod already.
It seems like the PDA was a transitional device whose time has come and gone.
#DeleteChrome
The only device that you are guaranteed to take everywhere with you every day is your mobile phone (unless you're one of those people). The device of the future is going to be the mobile phone, it will have lots more memory, as big a screen as you can give it and it will be a PDA. People don't always take their mp3 players or pdas with them because they're something extra but they do take their phones. Its all about wireless connectivity of some sort.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
In Korea only old people play BINGO.
In Soviet Russia BINGO plays you!
The ipod is sexy because it's always improving. When the pda was constantly improving it was an object of desire. My first 3 pdas were bought within three years of each other and each was an order of magnitude improvement over it's predecessor. But that was back in the 90's.
Maybe that's why my wife no longer finds me irresistable?
Give the public a device with incredible flexibility and utility for all sorts of portable applications, and they'll say "yeah, so what?"
Give them an elegant, intuitive interface for that same device, and they'll buy millions of them.
Frankly, I think computers as a whole have gotten too abstract. We don't see devices for information gathering (web browsing) that aren't coupled to communications (cell phone) devices. We don't see devices for content creation (graphical workstations) that don't have every other computer application bundled along with them (desktop pc). For the vast majority of cases, the devices we use offer long lists of capabilities of which we use a small portion.
Having said all this, I own a Motorola A780 and I love it. I use the phone, calendar, and alarm many times daily. I use the 1.3MP still/video camera several times a week and the media player about once a week. I use the task list and notepad a few times a month. I never play games on it. If it had a better calculator, I would use that much more often. Other than that, I don't really even know what else it can do. When I bought it, I decided to add 256MB of transflash for media storage ($35 and the largest I could get), which I've used extensively. It wasn't cheap, and it doesn't have the best battery life (it handles three-day trips out of town on business), and it certainly could have better camera quality, but most of the features are good enough that I feel happy with the purchase. Of course, you can't buy them easily in the USA.
There are some applications that can be coupled, but until the interfaces all take several bounding leaps forward, the combination devices are going to have a difficult time making any headway in the market. Who wants to pay $500 for a mediocre combination device that does a few things pretty well when they can pay $600 and get each device separately with top-of-the-line quality? Me, but only because I hate having a bunch of crap in my pocket.
I own a PDA exclusively for the use as a Destinator, with a GPS.
Well, actually, I recently started using it for music too, but I think that's just a fad.
It seems it took pocketpc's a few years to go through enough iterations to become useful. Over the past month a couple have come out that make them borderline useful. The one I'm going to get is the HTC Universal (http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000777057087/). It seems to have decent battery life, can play music/video, has wifi/bluetooth/3g connectivity, can edit office docs, pick up e-mail, and play games quite reasonably. The storage is SD cards, which are now up to 4GB, which is starting to get useful now were counting in GB's. The only downside is it can't act as a USB host - then I could plug in my ipod and use it as extra storage :). The best thing is they're going on cheap mobile contracts for no more than a 3g phone...
People want something that does one or two things extremely well, not something that does lots of things not as well. There are maybe %5 of consumers out there that ride the leading edge (early adopters, i.e.) and want, no, crave lots of techy gadgetry while the other %95 of us just want useful tools and gadgets that don't require a PhD in quantum mechanics to operate.
Over simplification, perhaps, but you get the gist.
There is simply too much glass..
The Ipod/mp3 player targets the audiophile. The PDA targets... everyone, but it really offers no singular feature.
So with the ipod, you basically have a piercing sort of effect, where you hit a group, and you hit them damn hard (no CDs, light, easy to use). You penetrate a part of the market and word of mouth takes it from there.
PDA seems more of a blugeoning type strategy, where if you actually win over any part of the market its more because you hit a soft-spot less than you really hit on what people want.
Lastly, technology is a predominantly male field. They see somethign they want that does somethign they want. They get it. Then eventually they have everythign they need and they want to combine it. We don't really think "Well... I want an MP3 player... what else do I want it to do? I want an MP3 player that sends emails!" nah.. not your average train of thought.
As my good friend once points out to me "so.. since your cell phone has a clock on it.. does that mean your clock makes a call, or your phone tells time?"
its all in marketing.
My experience is that the quality of these devices does not merit the overall cost.
I won an HP pocket PC at a conference and this device had two major hardware failures in a two month time span.
It wasn't a bottom model either: it was a decent high-midline unit with some great features.
The first failure was a crack in the LCD screen. I opened up the case one day and I could see the oil swiming around under the plastic screen. This did not result from abuse of the product either: I kept it within a high quality aluminun case. I left it out on the counter one night and the next morning, the screen was cracked and there was a big oil puddle behind the plastic. I had to jump through flaming hoops to get the screen replaced under warranty. The CS rep who "helped" me admitted that this was a common problem with the model that I had.
About two weeks after I got the unit back from repair, it burned out while charging on my desk at work. I heard a little pop, the light went out, and it would no longer turn on. I tried getting a new charger, replacing the battery, etc. and the thing was just gone. This time, I had zero luck getting it replaced under warranty.
A product that breaks after little use and zero abuse is worthless. In comparison, I've had the same cell phone for five years without having any problems.
I often wondered what the purpose of PDAs were until I was recently bequeathed one. After several weeks of having it, I am unable to understand how I lived without it.
With a card, I can hold most of my frequently used music. I can write notes, and documents. All without having to find a pen and paper. Also, and more importantly, I will have these notes accessible later, and won't be searching for them.
I have found a number of freeware EE applications on the web. This makes my life definitely easier. When I have a moment between things, and out on the road, the games I have entered make the time pass quicker. In fact, I am even writing a novel on it during these moments, and before I go to bed.
In short, the PDA is an interactive piece of paper that is always with you. I don't think that these will go the way of the dodo. In fact, my only regret that my model is not also a cell phone. My next cellphone will definitely include a PDA.
1) While they do many things, they do most of them badly:
2) PDA OSs have various disadvantages compared to embedded OSs like those on media players:
3) Now that most people have cell phones, they don't need a PDA to keep contact info (and in many cases, cell phones can do other PIM stuff as well).
4) Media players are generally more durable than PDAs.
The iPod is a very well designed device that brought a lot of innovation in ease of use to the portable digital music player market. I use a Palm OS device daily, but it can be a clunky device, especially for the non-geek. Pocket PCs have their fans, but it's just another Microsoft OS, IMO. I have no doubt that if Steve Jobs and Apple set their minds to it, they could release a PDA-like device that would blow people away. Slashdot posters who sneer at Palms and Pocket PCs would then rhapsodize about how they just couldn't live without thier 'iPDA' (I'm sure they could come up with a better name for it). Of course, the iPod may just mutate into that kind of device anyway.
-G
www.pixelstatic.com
Rumors of the PDA's death are greatly exagerated, they may be replaced by phones and Ipods for some uses, but they have found thier own niche in areas such as collecting scientific data in the field (out of range of WIFI and cell signal). In the field I work in (Snow Science & Avalanche mitigation) , the PDA has revolutionized data collection, and we get more users almost daily, see http://www.snowpilot.org/ Mark
Does your PDA have a 60gb hard drive? If so, did it cost the same as an iPod?
Most of the PDA's I've seen deliver but they fall just short of what the user wants. Granted some are better than others but the truth is the apps almost all feel like they are crippled. Then the typical PDA owner seems to also have high expectations; they seem to think that the PDA should replace the laptop when reality is more like it is an accessory to a laptop.
Amazingly, I think I fall in to the same trap. I'd like to see a true blue little computer that runs the exact same O/S I use on my primary computer and the exact same applications that I run on my primary computer. Frankly, anything less will leave me feeling like I can't get the most out of the machine.
I have helped a couple of salespeople get upper-end PDA's to do some interesting things. They use the PDA to show customers custom taylored one-on-one presentations. This works very well for the salesperson because they get the person inside of their personal space and this (apparently) helps establish a bond that closes deals. These guys are hooked on their PDA and I understand why. It is a valuable selling tool that can also be used to record details while working one-on-one with the customer.
Most people want a lot more than a device that does one thing and does it well. They want the PDA to be a sort of Swiss Army Knife device. That is harder to do. Using it for anything beyond a very short email or recording a very short note makes it show it's limitations very quickly. Some of these limitations are addressed by add-on devices like folding keyboards and so on. While I do not have a lot of experience with these accessories, the one or two people that I have asked tell me most of these things are poorly made or poorly implimented and that they seem to take away from the functionality of the device because it takes time to assemble all the junk. I guess I understand that.
I can see a couple of things that I'd like a PDA to do for me and I know the hardware is out there, things like a GPS reciever and a multi-media player (which I would want to interface with my car's radio). I suppose that if I was willing to shell out the bux and limit my use of the device to a few things that it does well, I could be satisfied but I know myself and I would keep pushing the machines limits, trying to make it into something it isn't quite ready to be. For that reason, I will wait to buy my next PDA until they have grown up!
On the other hand I could see the use of a fully functional mini computer. Something along the lines of an OQO, but not Windows based. Perhaps OSX? :-) I hate convergence. I like my devices to do what they do very well. If they do too many things battery life will suffer. So PDA's, dead to me.
Peace
I hate carrying more than a wallet, keys, and a cell phone around with me, and a PDA is generally larger than any of these. If I can get a phone that combines the basic PDA features (which I have, the Sharp v903SH) and gives me a decent camera (3.2MP w/optical zoom), then I see no reason to get a PDA.
In the old days PDAs had this amazing invention attached: a keyboard. Whether it was a PSION II, III or V, a Windows CE device, or even an Atari Portfolio, you could actually type useful stuff in. It's completely idiotic the way the "coolness" of having a touch screen seems to have outweighed the usefulness of keyboards in the eyes of PDA designers.
Frankly, I think it's idiotic.
Gee maybe because one costs under 100USD, if not maybe a little over 100USD. The other costs on average 300-400USD.
First of all, the PDA is dying because of usability. Most people don't have an address book or calandar large enough to justify needing electronically assited organization of it. It takes less time to add phone numbers/meeting to a paper DayRunner adn suits most people's needs, at far lower cost.
Secondly, the PDA's functionality is being superceded by new features of cell phone and digital music players. When you can store you address book in your iPod/cell phone and the cell phone/web portal has calendaring functions is there any reason to pay for a dedicated device to do the same things?
What about the Zaurus? It runs linux so you can add apps (nicely if not easily), it plays back media fairly successfully, it's got a full keyboard which is easy to use, and it's got a choice of landscape or portrait screen.
I haven't had mine long so I don't know the major pitfalls yet, but it seems good to me. Especially with the new models with hard disks.
Note to self: Don't comment on
I was gonna say they should slap Hello Kitty stickers on PDAs and let them market themselves.
You're almost there. There're a few other features PDAs have over laptops.
I use a PDA daily. It is vital to my productivity. But I also have an iBook. I don't use my PDA for my addressbook anymore. I look numbers up on my iBook. I don't take notes on my PDA anymore. Anything important goes into my iBook. I could play MP3s on my PDA, but I'd rather use my iPod for that. It's easier to manage and manipulate for music. I can also play music on my iBook while doing other work, something the Zire72 attempts but doesn't always succeed in.
The two things that PDA are indispensable for me are To Do lists and Calendars. Laptops don't beep at me, and boy do I need that beep. My Zire72 has a piercing shrill alarm I can hear all over the house. My iBook not so loud. My PDA turns on instantly. My iBook not so quickly, especially if I have to cold boot it. And since I replaced my PDA's Graffiti2 with the original version, the hand writing recognition is very fast.
However, if my iBook had a PDA screen built into the lid with access to my to do lists and calendar (synced with iCal or Entourage of course) and a loud alarm, it might possibly replace my PDA.
In fact, I think it would replace my PDA.
The Splintered Mind - Overcoming
Simplicity and elegance are what's missing from the Palm/PDA world. Apple, as usual, came through with these qualities on a device for a very specific task. Somebody said it's a "jack of all trades, master of none problem"...exactly. The Apple products don't do something unless it's an example of mastery. The iPod line is mastery of portable music. To further the damage, Palm has been driving itself into the ground, at least since my first Palm in 1999 (yes, not that long ago...but I was 15). Even then, plugging into serial every time was a pain. Then, in 2001, I gave it up because it was ridiculous to try to get it to work with USB *and* MacOS X. I bought another one last year and ended up giving that up...because it still was finicky to sync (like another poster said, syncing is really easy for the iPod line, but (can be) hell with PDAs), changed from the excellent Graffiti to Graffiti 2, and tried to do way more than it was supposed to. Now, it wasn't a device made to give me my appointments and contacts instantly, it was a device that tried to do too much. Apple will release a PDA one day, and it will be masterful.
Ever notice how fast Windows runs? Neither do I - get Mac OS
Then I bought an iPod mini... two days before they announced the Nano. And it was good!? I carry little scraps of paper until I get back to my laptop, then I update iCal and Address Book. Then I sync my iPod. And it works. Ok, I'm not a road warrior, but it works, and it charges easily, and it plays for a long (>1 day) time. And it is good enough.
... grumble, grumble, grumble, mutter, mutter, Millenium... Hand... Shrimp, I tol' 'em, I tol' 'em.
and a minivan isn't quite good enough for anything...
Oh well, what the hell...
Not exactly. My three year old Zaurus 5500 takes SD and those are getting into the gigabytes now and you can use it and a CF wifi at the same time. Sure it's not tens of GB, but it's more than most "Plays for Sure" dedicated players have and you could use the same CF hard drive in a PDA's CF slot. So what's really going on?
"Where is the convergence device?" you ask. The tech is there, obviously, and it's been there for years. Why is it that your PDA, which is more powerful than your five year old laptop, won't play music, movies or tie in to phone service?
The future, for now, is lost in big dumb company greed. Look at the abuse Apple puts up with from the RIAA. Cell phones? Don't get me started at how stupid and greedy the incumbent phone companies are and how much pure bullshit phone makers have to put up with so that you have to pay hundreds of dollars for a $30 device that will never leave your current carrier. The only worse offender is Microsoft which wants it's fingers in everyone else's pie and routinly breaks your toys by both malice and incompetence. These asinine companies will never agree on anything and they will make it impossible to make and market a general purpose device that does everything at a reasonable price. Outside of free software you will are still stuck with half a dozen devices that won't talk to each other and sometimes won't even talk to themselves.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Apple sold something like 10,000 Apple IIs the first year. It was considered a huge success.
Apple sold something like 100,000 Newtons the first year. It was considered a huge failure.
I'm sure its worse now because any PDA is going to be compared to the huge market for phones. The dedicated PDA market just isn't that big.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
No really, you can't buy a cellphone. You can only lease one from your provider. At least in the US. Because cell networks must approve the devices that live on their networks, they can veto anything that looks too useful. Like, say, a *good* iPod clone that doesn't give the network provider a 100% tax on music loaded. Or software that gives you decent RSS feeds, or location-dependent services, again, without a tax that's somewhere greater than 100% of the inherent service cost.
This is what I was praying for at the last Apple keynote:
Steve Jobs says "oh, and one more thing. We have a GSM iPod now. [Audience says, ooh, ahh. It is beautiful. There is a brief demo.] It will be on sale in Europe within a month. Unfortunately, we have not been able to reach any agreement with US providers, which is unfortunate, since any provider that is willing to have our device on their networks will both help their customers, and provide an incentive for people to switch to that network. At http://apple.com/cellpod/ we've put a few links if those of you with American cell contracts would like to speak with the potential network providers in the US. Remember, we'd like to sell you as many of these as we can. That means that you will only be helping us if you can provide valid economic arguments to them. Although I'm sure many of you blogging on AirPort connections are shorting out your keyboards with drool over this. [Roar of audience laughter.]"
I have an Imate PocketPC phone and it is one of my favorite gadgets. I still have an Ipod for music but having a 400mhz PC in my pocket is great. Sure it is not as good as a laptop but a laptop doesn't fit in my pocket. I always have web access, email and my calendar in my pocket. I no longer need to drag a laptop around with me when I am on support. I can telnet and VNC into the web servers at works diagnose problems and restart services. I have a PlayStation portable but don't always want to carry it around, the pocket PC's games are nowhere near as good as the PSP but they are a good distraction while waiting for something or on public transport. Sure the thing locks up more than an old mobile phone that just made calls, but calls are the thing I do the least with my phone. But hey, I am a techie nerd, most people would not require the functionality I have come to rely upon from my phone.
As an owner of an iPaq h6315 PocketPC phone, I can understand this question as well as answer it. The device is awesome, conceptually, and for a geek with my patience, it's great about 90% of the time, but 10% of the time for me it's a pain in the ass, and for the average user, it just sucks.
Major Flaws-
Every once in a while (like every few months), it performs a hard reset, losing all information, settings, etc. Usually not too big of a problem because it performs an incremental backup on my computer when I plug it into the charging cradle, but still a pain in the ass. Especially when it did it in the middle of my trip to NYC, when I was away from my computer.
Stupid interface decisions, such as-
-Copying the windows interface is insufficient for a handheld device. None of the programs can be easily operated with one's fingers. Even the on-screen "buttons" for the phone are too small. I don't want to have to pull out the stylus just to do basic things. Like, if I'm browsing the web, I should be able to use my fingers to scroll up and down, go forward/back, etc. Fortunately, I'm pretty good at tapping with the corner of my pinky, but I don't think this is acceptable for most people.
-No way to lock the screen without putting the device in standby. I can start music playing in WMP, but I can't put the phone back in my pocket, because the only way to lock the buttons and screen is to put the device in standby, which turns off the sound! One would think that the most basic usability testing would have revealed this flaw.
-The whole "programs don't close, they just disappear" paradigm. I don't know whose stupid idea it was, but fortunately there's SPB Pocket Plus to get around it. I shouldn't HAVE to buy 3rd party software to make my device work properly.
-Inadequate webpage rendering. It's getting better, and NetFront is pretty good, but it's in no way there yet.
The camera is worthless. They basically put the simplest, cheapest sensor in there just to say it has a camera. And it doesn't record video, either.
Insufficient storage is also a problem, as well as the USB being too slow for data transfer. Neither of these are huge problems for what I use the phone for (I don't care about having my ENTIRE music collection with me at all times) but I think the average consumer demands more than the 64MB onboard plus 2GB one can add w/SD cards.
I also wouldn't mind having a more powerful processor that can handle playing through bluetooth stereo headphones. I tried a pair, but you basically can't be doing anything else with the phone, and it's still glitchy.
Don't get me wrong- there are tons of things I love about it. Being able to check my e-mail and surf the web from anywhere is cool. Being able to sync w/MS Money is a godsend, because I'm terrible about keeping a checkbook register. Having one single device to put in my pocket that is all these things, as well as a MP3 player and my phone, is excellent.
Alas, this continual source of joy is also a continual source of frustration. I suppose those of you who are Linux users can sympathize. I can't help thinking Apple, or some other company with an eye for good UI/product design could make something that does everything my device does, but without the headaches. Maybe someday they will... but I'm not holding my breath...
My Visor went from "a way to read webpages anywhere" to "remote control with crappy range" to "not worth buying batteries for".
The iPaq went pretty much directly to "not worth buying batteries for".
I always tend to think PDAs are lacking like one or two more features to be really useful. If a device could do a few things *well*, like cell phone, mp3 player and voice recorder, and have decent battery life, and a viable way for me to carry it around without looking like an idiot, that would be golden.
And I have a really high expectation of *doing things well*. I want standard data formats, file transfer compatibility with multiple operating systems, jacks for headphones/microphones, multiple bitrate en/decoding, expandable storage, and most importantly *no clunky software*. I think the iPod succeeds because it passes most of these basic requirements.
Obviously PDAs as general purpose devices aren't going to meet all of those requirements. But there is an opportunity to target devices to specific users.
College students, for instance, would love the device I've described. Doctors, perhaps, might not. Instead, they might want something to replace a pocket calendar. Features such as e-book reading, good calendaring, e-mail reading, and perhaps a profession-specific application, would fit together into something like a tablet form factor. While a college student would feel like an idiot carrying one of those around, a doctor wouldn't.
Housewives might want a device that sticks to the fridge and takes grocery lists, remembers frequently-requested items, scans barcodes at the grocery store to compare prices, and, I don't know, comes with a transfer program that creates nice comma-delimited files and includes a few spreadsheet templates for budgeting or integrates with Quicken or something.
All of these pretty much require specific hardware, but the software could be somewhat standardized. Being able to integrate with other software and devices the person already has is the real key. Of course nobody has ever really done this well. MS products integrate only with MS products, and have frustrating limitations. Palm makes you go through a labyrinthine program to get anything transferred at all, and also likes to create their own "standards". From there, it gets worse.
Why is interoperability such a problem? It never hurts to break compatibility with a competitor's product. There's no market for software upgrades. There's no incentive to keep supplying updates for free. People won't keep buying new hardware devices and throwing them away. The companies capable of creating and enforcing standards, OS makers, are too busy chasing profits farther up the application stack. If you could manage to get a few companies to agree to cooperate, it wouldn't be enough momentum to last more than a couple of years, before they're all bankrupt or the largest one has decided to cannibalize the others.
The only times multi-vendor data standards have *ever* really worked has been in OSS, where the users themselves are motivated to maintain compatibility, and are blessed with the ability to do so effectively. So, do PDAs need Open Source? I don't know, perhaps. They need something.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Very simple... My teenage daughter paid her own money for an iPod and can use it easily. She walked into the Mac store (Glendale Galleria), played with one for three minutes, and could use it. No problem. She bought it. She now wants a Mac Mini.
She tried to use a PDA, with guidance, and still lost interest almost immediately. She said it was like trying to use a PC with ten foot chopsticks.
Apple == Ease of use. Zero learning curve to start. Like a toaster.
Note that this does not exclude a learning curve and more sophistication _after_ entry. Entry must be immediate and rewarding.
to put it simply, ipod is advertised a LOT. you see it on the bus ads, tv, the "free deals" on the net, pretty much everywhere. ive never seen (at least i dont think) a PDA ad anywhere except on gagdet-specific sites.
Ok I can sell you a PDA or I can sell you an ipod and a Notebook, and..... Oh wait I can sell more things if I advertise ipods in fact I can sell someone an ipod and a PDA hmmmm...
I am fairly certain its about simplicity. A dedicated appliance is so much easier to use and understand than a PC or handheld PC. I do not want to fiddle around with settings and upgrading buggy software on my mp3 player or phone.
HTTP/1.1 400
you need 60GB of music at any one time with you. I've got an HP PDA w/ 512MB card in it, and it carries all the music I can handle.
If you need to carry roughly 15,000 songs (roughly a month's worth of music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week), you have other problems.
Working with PDA's as I have for the last year, the main problem is focus. The device needs to focus on specific functionality. If it is a PDA, it should act to assist in managing scheduling and communications. The one I have noticed that has done this best is the Blackberry.
Why?
It focuses on keeping people connected and organized.
It can tie seemlessly into organizer software (Outlook/Groupware).
It is relatively simple to use.
Good battery life.
It is reliable in comparison to other devices I have seen.
It does not focus on whiz-bang internet access, audio, or multimedia. In other words it simply works well for it's primary purpose. The rest of the PDA's seem to try to be everything to everyone.
Because people are dumb!
1. No Clickwheel. Or... No Keyboard.
2. The large screen and the MP3 playing (and smaller battery) leaves me w/rundown battery... can't pull up contacts or make a call now.
3. Bigger than an iPod (or a phone), no matter what.
It's a question of whether the device was designed for the purpose you want it for. When using a Nokia mobile, I get the feeling that the person who designed it wanted to do the same things that I do (calls, texts, etc.).. It makes sense, it doesn't get in my way.
A PDA? It's not designed to play music or video.. how do I know I won't have to jump through hoops to get it to do either?
What you can do is irrelevant to 99% of the population (who are not geeks). It's what you can do easily that's important.
If what it's designed for captures my imagination, and it's presented so I feel I know how to use it, it's sold.
(Disclaimer - I am drunk)
I remember the first time I bought a Palm Pilot. The sync software was horrid. It took me hours to get it to connect, and days for it to sync with Outlook. Hunting down various patches for "conduits" on Palm's site was a joke.
iTunes was a very stark contrast. It worked right after I installed the iPod software and fired up iTunes. It's never not worked.
PDA's are targeted for the business community. iPods are for the audio-video-phile. Both devices fit their target audience very well.
Coderz 4 Life
PDA-merged-with-communication-devices are doing well. Corporations buy lots of Treos and wireless iPaqs and Blackberrys because of the calendar and e-mail sync with corporate.
I love using my PDA phone to stay organized, browse the web (Wikipedia, BBC news, Google mobile are all usable), run simple apps and games, but I want more convergence. After wallet and keys I only have one pocket left, and I only have two ears for the headset. It's not that hard, just take a pocket-sized clamshell device and put:
There's no reason why the UI and quality of all these functions can't be every bit as good as dedicated devices. It's a general-purpose computer already, it's got enough storage, buttons, and screen real estate for all these functions bar heavy typing!
Samsung announced such an über-device over two years ago, the Palm-based sph-i550. But they cancelled it, supposedly due to software bugs and cost. It seems the latest Europe-only Nokia and Sony-Ericsson multimedia phones are moving towards the same comprehensive feature set; has anyone tried using them for all these functions?
The problems with doing so much include focus and marketing. And it's a huge software bundle and is likely to have lots of bugs and substandard applications for months or years. What would help is an open platform so you can install a better music player or calendaring app, but it's got to have a ton of well-defined API's so the different functions can share the buttons appropriately, yield to each other on incoming calls, and cooperate on sharing/sync'ing with a PC.
=S
I would have to buy some program to get better audio quality out of my iRiver. I tried some free prgram but it sucked. I would have to pay 30 bucks for a media program when I got a nice iRiver for 40. Plus the buttons there are so many buttons they confuse me and I stumble. Plus the thing locks up and I ocasionally drop it in the toilet. Ack.
Added Pressly: "Oh, and by the way, milk is nothing but liquid meat."
PDAs seem like a good idea when you value your work life enough to carry it around with you. PDAs showed up at a time when most people's data was centralized on their desktop's hard drive.
Two things happened:
1) the market crashed, everyone gave up on the idea that if they sacrificed their life to their job, and melded the disparate goals in their life to their corporate goals, they would get rich. to that end, everyone wanted to have their personal and corporate life in a sexy little device they could access at home, work and starbucks.
2) the data just isn't centralizable anymore. between corporate databases, ASPs, etc., synchronizing is almost impossible. you want your contacts? nobody gets excited about contacts anymore.
iPods are for lifestyle and play. Work isn't as much a lifestyle thing anymore. And good riddance.
Remember faxes? For a while there everyone was using them.
It took ~100 years after inventing them for faxes to catch on with the common person.
PDA adoption should happen faster (think cell doing everything), but it'll still be another decade.
Nobody really wants the inconvenience of windoze in his pocket.
Even if Apple licensed the iPod software as an application for PDAs, it would be crap without that magnificent little input device. It's a shame they couldn't figure out how to put a scroll wheel on the Moto iTunes phone, as that's probably why they had to limit it to 100 songs.
Listening to music is a secondary activity, PDAing is a primary activity. My ideal device might have a scroll wheel and an LCD on one side for music and a completely separate display and keyboard for PDA/phone functions on the other side.
Apple filed for patents on the scroll wheel and other iPod technologies but success is uncertain.
The one thing wrong with current PDAs is they are not mass storage devices like the iPod. Information is king! The iPod trumps even the USB thumbdrive for capacity. It holds more than music and video. It holds data, ready at your fingertips, and small enough to fit unnoticed in your pocket. If I walk into a meeting, where I'm not schuled to present, and I have data, a presentation, and maybe a video, and all of my personal data (resume, portfolio (rich media in my case), etc.). It can be a valuable asset. All you have to do is plug it into any computer already there. Yours or no. Mac, Windows, Linux, wherever!
It's the one device right now that after people have one they can't do without. I had a PDA, for years. Before EVERYBODY had one. I loved it. It kept me from getting canned from my first management job, because I could no longer keep my day-to-day schedule straight in my head for a week. It was nuts, chaotic for a while. The PDA saved my butt, because it beeped at me 15 minutes before I had to go to a meeting. But, Over time I learned to manage my schedule on a laptop. The PDA became redundant as I was already traipsing my laptop with me to and from work, and that was the only time it was off. So the PDA now sits on a shelf. My iPod is with me everywhere too. In the car, in the office, in meetings it's in my pocket. And it has the PIM features of a PDA built in, so if my laptop is not appropriate to bring to a meeting, I can check my schedule on my iPod.
Oh, and I like music so I listen to it a lot!
Hi:
Here's another biggie: Never buy a Palm device without an extended warranty. The quality of manufacture is really shocking. Hey, I love Palm's Tungstens. They're nice devices, they just are not meant to be ever taken out of the bubble pack.
The iPods, however are well made.
That being said, a Palm device does a lot,for the user who has trouble adding attachments to e-mail, the iPod has proved bloody brilliant. Three cheers to its designers and to the engineers who screwed it together.
Ahhh, but I can download hardcore smut with a usenet reader on my Pocket PC. All with one hand, and anywhere in (or outside) my house. You can't get much more usefull than that. (evil grin)
Havoc Video
The single most important Apple skill: Apple gives good out of box experience. They care and it shows. Their stuff is intuitive and it works. I just brought my 60GB vPod home and you know what? Took me all of 3 minutes to plug it in, bring up preferences and manipulate six very straight forward panels: Music, sync 'em. Video, sync 'em. Photos, just my lovely princess' pictures please, and yes full size too. Contacts, yes. Calendar, yes, but only 4 of my 8 calendars.
Microsoft has never made it that simple. Install Active sync off the CD? Are you insane? Hit the Microsoft web site and get the latest working copy buddy! Is there a configuration tool that guides you through things like "I notice you have a registered Microsoft Reader on this PC. Would you like all your ebooks transfered and the Pocket PC authorized to read them?"
Microsoft can't even leverage the things they control properly.
Out of box experience? They're Microsoft, they don't have to care.
And after the out of box experience... Can I use my Internet enable Pocket PC with Pocket IE to purchase and download a Microsoft Reader format ebook? Can you believe the answer is no? I couldn't either.
They're Microsoft, they don't have to care and it shows.
How does a lack of market dominance equal failure? Is that like how Linux and Macintosh account for less than 10% of the total desktop market mean that they are failures? Or perhaps maybe it just means, that not every person is going to need/want the same tool?
My shuffle is the first music player I've really used solidly. My pockets contain a wallet, a basic nokia phone, work id (smart card), 1 gig usb key, a 1 gig shuffle, white earphones. There's very limited space in a guy's pockets, and the shuffle wouldn't be in there if it didn't get used every single day.
Random selection of my fave music is my chosen way of listening to music.
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
why? it's too big and it needs a pen
To be snazy I'd say PDA suffer from
- So many features
- So little screen
- Too many (or too few) button
- So much to learn
Any one want to use technology like soIf its so hard to figure how to tell the machine what I want, or if takes too long too learn what the machine can do, less and less people will be interested, most people would want a more straight forward relationship with the machine, not a relation ship that require much learning, investigation, trial and error, etc...
I think mobile phones and IPod succeeded where PDAs have failed because, IPods and Phones too a bottom up approach, that started with few basic functionality and added more little by little, teaching the user the interface and the new feature step by step.
PDAs on the other hand started with vague (or non basic, non interesting) functionality added even more
So finally I think its a matter of balance, adding as many feature as possible within a simple interface as possible, I think even IPods and phone will reach a point where its no longer appealing to add feature and en-reciproque complexity to the interface. PDAs started at the top that have to remove features to reach the correct balance which is not commercially feasible, mobile phones started with one basic functionality and added more along the way, they will reach the balance or the break even point in a more commercially sensible way. By adding features not removing them
I think it has to do with simplicity. The iPod started out as an elegantly designed single-purpose device that was stylish as well as functional. It became popular to the point of indispensability. It was easy to figure out how to use, because it only did one thing: play music. Gradually, to continue to provide reasons to buy new models and to differentiate itself from the competition, it added features: Contacts, calendar, photos, movies. This is in contrast to many other MP3 players that were on the market even before the iPod that had more storage and features at the same price point, but were not as easy to use or as pleasing to the eye. I'm thinking of the old Diamond Rio I used to own, as well as most of the devices by Archos and their ilk. They worried about how the list of features would look on the spec sheet and whether that seemed to justify the price point. I think the same is true in the PDA and PDA/phone market. I've always been unable to explain the popularity of the Blackberry. I've never owned one, having started out with Palm devices in the late 90s, moving up through the Treo 650 I have now, which is much as you describe your PocketPC. It's a phone, an organizer, it has thousands of third party software packages, can read and edit Microsoft Word documents, can play music and video, and can access the Internet. When the Blackberry came out, all it did was store addresses and send text messages. Slowly they added other features, just like Palm started out with a simple organizer and then added features to become what it is. I'm not arguing that the level of popularity, success, or quality is even among these three devices, just that the approach was the same, in contrast to PocketPC, which came right out of the starting gate advertising a laundry list of capabilities, attempting to out-feature Palm devices to death. That might finally be working now, but still, these are complex devices that do lots of things fairly well, as compared to the iPod, which does a few things very well. The other thing I always wondered about was storage. Today's 30Gb iPod with video isn't much different in form factor than my Treo 650. But all the iPod does is play music and video, and a few other things. My Treo, on the other hand, has a lot more features, but much less storage. I've often wondered what is it about the market that hard drives came so quickly to music players and so slowly to organizers-- even when those phones and organizers now tout music and video capabilities, but shackle you to a couple of gigabytes of storage, maximum, through various card slots. At the moment the LifeDrive is the only exception I can think of, and it isn't interesting to me because it isn't a phone. I'm waiting for a good organizer/phone/media player that has a HD for storage, but I'm betting it's going to be awhile longer.
No Really, no PDA is as good at being a music player as an iPod, and it's not going to be as good at video, they certainly are too big to be my phone, and compared to a GameboySP, it can kiss my ass, much less the PSP...
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
The answer is simple: because iPods are simple.
PDAs are scaled down computers. They are complicated no matter how you look at them. By contrast, the iPod is simple. It does what you expect so simply that even a 5 year old could operate it. You can't say that of any PDA I have ever seen, including the PDAs Apple has made.
Modern iPods play videos and show pictures, but these features were added after the market was firmly in Apple's grasp. The iPod at it's heart is still the simplest MP3 player out there.
iPods are simple because they do what you expect very well.
As an early user of the Newton, I had it all also! It was nirvana! except for the lack of adoption, and a lack of applications. An 8 meg card provided additional memory. Some of the coolest people in CS were using them also. We looked fondly upon each others conniseurship of shiny computer products. But, people just don't want to play those geeky games. They want music. They want a phone that doesn't crash, and when it does, they want to call a telco.
It's not that it will never happen, it's that it's a difficult problem. How do we access vast amounts of information through a separated interface. One we touch, one we talk to, or listen to. When the iPod is as poweful as a powerbook or four, it will happen.
My Dad, Grandfather, youger brother, friends, roomates, girlfriends all own iPods for one simple reason. They don't have to think to use it. Although PDA's do a lot more, the general public does not need that much. I benefit from wi-fi and email access in a PDA, but most people, who would have a hard time explaining what a POP server is, just don't care. All they want is one button to push to hear their music. Living on the edge, although has it's advantages, is not for the general population.
My eyes, my eyes! These goggles do nothing!
I know alot of people when I show them my PDA they simply say "oh, my life isn't busy enough to need one of those". Many people just don't have enough stuff to really warrant a full calendar, to do list, always on email and IMimg and everything else.
On the other hand just about everyone wants to listen to music somewhere where their CD collection isn't.
Ease of use.
Anyone can just walk up and use one. I have had a few PDAs that never integrated well into my lifestyle as I was not willing to change my lifestyle for them. The iPod just works and does its job well. It is natural now that Apple has buy-in with the comfort crowd that they are expanding the feature set. I suspect you will see applets for iPods similar to the ones apple is bundling. But they will likely have to pass a heavy muster with the gods at Apple to allow a 3rd party the blessing to run on their device.
---- Now I am done ---- Shh
Oh, so it's not just my Windows Mobile phone that does all those things? Don't you love how it chooses to filter out your calls. Mine is kind enough not to bother me by ringing/vibrating when a call comes in, but it immediately notifies me that I missed the call.
I love it when I make a call and the speaker phone comes on. Conveniently, the buttons lock up, so there's no way to switch back to the ear piece. No worry -- 10 seconds into the conversation it switches back on its own.
I'm glad I upgraded the software to Windows Mobile 2003. All the previous version (Smartphone 2002) did was reboot at random times. That got boring after a while. I mean, how original! My Windows XP PC does that all the time.
Ah, Windows. Whether XP or Mobile, what a miserable piece of technology it is.
I also got a Treo 650 for one reason: To SAVE SPACE!!
I need a phone for work and personal use.
I need a PDA for work.
I need to access my email a few times during the day.
Instead of my Palm 550, Nokia phone and laptop, I can do all of it with the Treo. Are there better devices for each individual tasks?
Of course. But Im not prepared to carry a man purse to lug them around.
The games, music and dinky camera are nice bonus to the device but are not the reason I use the TREO. The web browser is as limited as I thought it would be but when I really need something, it'll do the job.
That's why I say that the PDAs are for work, Ipods are toys.
I drive to and from work and have a nice soundsystem in my car that plays MP3's. When I get home, I have house that has a kick ass system that I can listen to in the living room, kitchen and bathroom (!), so the Ipod I got for my birthday is in a drawer along with the CD player I rarely used or the mini-disk.
Toys I dont need. Cool, I could care less about.
What I want from my gadgets is to make my life simpler.
The TREO I am sure will soon be overtaken by another device but for the time being it allows me to be productive, connected and amused and not burdened enough to need a bat-belt. That trumps anything else.
Dev tool prices and lack of freedom (as in speech) put me off. I thought about buying a PDA, as long as I could add a few apps of my own and improve the interface to suit me. None of them ever boasted any sort of built-in programmability. Just a cheesy BASIC interpreter would've worked. No, the only way to program the things was to buy an SDK. And every time I looked, the price was something like PDA: $200, basic SDK: $500. And for that premium price, the OS, SDK, and all weren't even open. Then there was ridiculous expensive stuff such as $20 for a freaking cover (leather, big whoop) for the PDA. I wasn't going to pay $700+ for a PDA that might not do what I wanted. So I never took the plunge. They played the old "hook 'em with the loss-leader and profit on the add-ons" game badly. Even ink jet cartridges aren't as big a rip-off. I wondered if someone couldn't do a PDA sized hardware emulation of an old computer like the Apple II or Commodore 64, which both have BASIC, if they couldn't come up with a decent programmable PDA. Apple II+, IIe, IIgs, how about Apple IIpda?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Keeping a mobile Calendar
Keeping a contact list
They are OK at:
doubling as a calculator
Sending email (if they have networking of some sort and a thumb board)
reading ebooks (if you have a high resolution, decent-sized screen)
They suck at:
Web-surfing
Word processing
Spread sheet use
Games (except solitare)
picture taking
picture manupulation
video shooting
video manipulation
storage
speed (Palms are decent here, but not good)
playing music
note taking
one handed UI navigation
What are they marketed as? A device that does all the things in the bottom list.
You really use GIMP on a Zaurus? Does it have a special GUI? How could the regular GUI work on such a small screen? Just the toolbox would take up most of the screen. Enlighten me, if you would. :)
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
The PSP could have been a nice PDA.
I would love to NOT have to carry around a bagful of gadgets. I've used both a palmOS and winCE/Mobile PDA, as well as cellphones including both.
Problem is, they didn't do anything particularly well.
My iPod is flawless for playing back music; it holds tons of it, is easy to use, and has a great system - the itunes store - behind it.
My cellphone.. well, ok that one's a compromise. I've got a blackberry - you can see the scar on my chest where they removed my soul, okay? The web browser on it absolutely sucks, but it's a reasonably good and very reliable phone that can survive being bounced around and getting a few drops of coffee on it now and then, and be small enough to fit in my pocket.
I sure do miss the better browser and screen that my Treo had, but I don't miss the frequent crashes, unpredictable behavior, and missed phone calls because the thing locked up.
One of these days someone will get a little closer, and of course I will be parting with another couple hundred bucks when it happens.
The PDA does not solve a problem, except for UPS and FedEx delivery drivers. For everybody else, there is the general problem of "time management and keeping shit organized," but the PDA does not solve that problem. It will only solve that problem when you get:
Until then, I do not need to spend $400 to play a mean game of solitaire while on the bus.
Let me give some background of where I am coming from. I owned the first RIO MP3 play, one of the first CD based MP3 player, the first DVD MP3 player, one of the first in dash MP3 players, a 1st Gen iPod, a 3rd Gen iPod, and a few random USB Thumbdrive type MP3 player. I currently carry an iMate Jam PocketPC phone, and have used a Samsung i-730, Torq P100, Siemens SX66, and a Sprint PPC-6700 lately (among others).
I love my Jam for what it is. Its a good phone, and a great PDA. As a media player? Not great. It works, but without the dedicated interface of even the cheap MP3 players its not the most user friendly device. The interfaces are getting there though. Devices like the Samsung SGH-i300 and even the much maligned (deservedly) Motorola iTunes phone, are getting there. Add a few dedicated buttons, a navwheel/pad/joystick that works, and some nice Bluetooth headphones, and you are there.
I think that's that's why everyone keeps clamoring for an Apple iPhone. They have proved they know how to make a good interface. I also thing that's why they aren't rushing one out the door. I don't think you can make a All-In-One device with as clean an interface as the iPod. If someone does though, I guarantee I will buy one.
And a laptop is actually useful
I finally broke down and bought a treo - I was waiting for the perfect phone/pda combo to come out (or at least one that doesn't suck) and got sick of waiting. If the Palm LifeDrive had a phone that might be slightly better for my purposes, but the Treo will do for the time being. The keyboard is not ideal, and I miss Grafitti, but it's more than usable. The form factor is not ideal - it's heavy and bulky and awkward to make calls with. But it works. I like PalmOS better than any other PDA OS I've used; it does email passably and web browsing from just about anywhere (and SprintPCS offers unlimited internet usage for $10/month). I also use pssh and PalmVNC pretty regularly on this device; it's nice to be able to ssh in from anywhere as well as to use VNC when necessary to remotely control another computer. DocumentsToGo is nice too since you can look at documents you've created with Word or Excel (but don't expect too much control over the docs; Word for example won't let you see or edit footnotes for example). I got a 512M card which is more than enough for my purposes - it's nice to be able to listen to mp3s on this once in a while but you're crazy if you want this to replace your music player. People laugh about the camera, but it's useful for documenting things when you don't have a real camera around, and associating phone numbers with photos is a great feature if you exchange phone numbers with lots of people (particularly people you meet, umm, drunk)... The biggest problem is finding a reasonable way to carry this thing; it's too bulky for a pocket and I'm not doing the gunslinger look.
Because operating a PDA is typically not easy compared to operating a iPod.
Whatever happened to the Oqo? Split the difference between a PDA and an ultraportable laptop... doesn't sound so bad to me.
Oh god, these companies are so stupid. They just don't get it, they just don't figure it out. ALL you have to do is put a 20gb hard-drive in the PDA, and I'll buy one. I'm waiting until PDA's have hard drives before I even consider purchasing one. This makes the PDA also an mp3 player or drive, which is high priority.
Look at the Sony i-phones and the new walkman cell phone. Does everything and has a external speaker (and sounds better). Costs about the same.
Basically with the slick designs and marketing to promote ease of use is why iPods sell (my phone battery life playing mp3s and internet surfing last longer than an iPod with a graphic i/f).
First: Ease of Use, people will always like products that are easy to use, I figured out how to operate an iPod on the Spot. No manual, I didn't even have to think about it. Second: Reliability, iPods are very reliable gadgest that don't crash as much as PDA, maybe that is because they do one thing as compared to a PDA. Third:Choice, when buying a iPod, I'm buying into a world of accessories that are just not there right now in the PDA market. Try to get a non-vendor compliant headphone to work with your PDA... it won't work because the vendors won't let you. Fourth:iPods are Cool man. Five:The total music experience is very simple, you go to iTunes, you download and you're rocking 5 minutes later. Try copying your music library to your PocketPC or PDA, better yet, Try doing it in less than one day. Good luck trying to do that. And finally, although there are many more reasons for iPod's dominance, the one thing that stands out is the company's innovative mindset. I'm not just talking industrial design, I'm talking the whole thing... Apple products just keep getting better. I used to love Microsoft and Creative, but Now I'm a Mac Convert. Once you go Mac, you'll never go back.
If there is one thing where the iPod beats the living crap out of pdas, it is in the explain the UI in twenty words or less, over loud music, at a house party ease of use. As opposed to the only a geek could love it ui of pdas.
Difference between pitching at the bleeding edge as opposed to the middle of the adoption curve.
People don't want computers to stay the same: you have to maintain them, add stuff, clean it up yourself, find things to do with it, etc.
The iPod is a PDA thats been locked down to do one thing, and one thing only: Play Music. PDA's have too many functions, and there is a saturation point for computer-application maintenance which is unbearable to many people. You get tired of having to maintain, tweak, fix, just to get something out of your investment.
If I spend $400 on something, I just want it to work, and work smoothly. I don't want to have to tweak, maintain, upgrade, fix, install, check out, fix, tweak, blah.
Custom Computing versus General Purpose computing means that software vendors can put a lot more focus on making their software just plain work, in affordable hardware that a person often overlooks as being 'the price of entry'. People don't buy iPods so that they've got powerful machines to do something on; they buy them to run one application, and one application only, and that is the iTunes music player.
There is a new age dawning in computing, you can see it in the bulges in peoples pockets, and that is the age of the custom, locked down computer. More and more, software people can think about putting their apps in hardware designed specifically to support their apps. The "Boxed Set" is becoming the computer...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I think anyone would prefer to buy an appliance that did one thing really well, over an appliance which purports to do a bunch of things, but does not provide the best user experience for all of them.
The iPod clickwheel interface is also very minimalist and simple and appeals to peope who are not power users or people who work a lot with computers. This broadens their appeal.
People want a portable appliance. That's what the iPod excels at. Simple user interface, intuitive, stylish. They don't want an "Operating System", which has "Java(tm)"-enabled "Application Software", which they can launch from some fancy "Applications Manager", etc. They want to push play and go. Hence PDAs fail, and iPod wins.
11*43+456^2
pdas and computers are things which come alive when they are given input, not just used to stream already existant information. so, i think the underlying cause for all the techinical, business and cultural problems with pda popularity stems from people not wishing to create that input for most of their day.
you could teach people how to touchtype well enough on an inbuilt fold-out keyboard which you could implement in a pda, but the expectation then that they must use it is all a bit frightening. and how many markets depend on this.
Archos's PMA 400 http://www.archos.com/products/prw_500594.html> does exactly what a PDA does and add media stuff: 30 gb harddisk MP3 Playback AVI playback (xvid/divx with mp3 audio stream, high res too (720x512)) Touchscreen PDA apps and for the /. croudeven runs linux out of the box.
So why doesn't this whip the (video) ipod?
Price?
Name?
Marketing (or absence of)?
My phone, an LG VX3100, is a phone. It isn't a pda. It doesn't play games. No camera, no web browser. It never hangs, it simply works. Best of all, Verizon paid me to take it!
So why did you spend money getting what you didn't want when you could have made money taking what you did want?
That is plenty of multimedia entertainment for the average person, and while the pricetag is slightly higher than an ipod mini, it is more than made up for in the video playback along with the aforementioned wifi and telephony capabilities.
Your iPaq is also HUGE compared to a nano, and even compared to the bigger ipod, which has way more storage. There really is no competition for most people who don't want to enter PDA details on the go and don't want or need the wifi.
Once the iPod fad fades
Yeah, no wireless, less space than a nomad. Lame.
All pocket computers suffer from the screen size issue. The Scopo or something like it, could solve that problem. The headset may look stupid now, but back in '97, I used to think people using mobile phones looked stupid.
Since Microsoft controlls the min specs for the Pocket PC Platform some blame is on them. If Microsoft included the folowing in the min spec i'm sure Pocket PC can make a comback.
- Standard Connectors
This will make accessories makers to Pocket PC happy since every other modell have diffrent connectors (that are all but imposible to get for a fair price)
- Give the Pocket PC the ability to be USB-HOST
The "new" xscale prcessors allready have support that are not used for this. And why this is not standard allready i do not understand? Think about all the USB connected accessories that can be used.
This two changes will transform the PDA to a TRUE mini computer. As it is now it's a Minicomputer that can't interface (IR != OK) to it's immediate surroundings in a cost efficient way.
As well as this, there is one other factor: People who want serious mobile computing power can buy a cheapish subnotebook and gte something that does everythinga pda does, only better.
That said, there's still a market, especially for telepony enabled PDAs, one that hasn't been much talked about yet. I set up a wi-fi broadband network over the summer for my mildly disabled father. He needed to be able to take his computer with him around the house, since he has trouble getting upstairs, so I got him a decent Toshiba Satelite Pro notebook. He also wanted a PDA that could do mobile telephony, wi-fi and normal PDA stuff as well, so I got what is marketed here in Britain as an O2 XDA IIc. He loves the thing, and the laptop tends to sit by until he wants to listen to internet radio, because, for E-Mails, the XDA is much easier to use. I think there could well be a growing market in PDAs for people with diminished mobility as they allow for a degree of freedom that even a wi-fi enabled notebook can't take.
That said, as nice and light and thin as the satelite pro is, it's still a rather large affair. So the XDA wins out on size, mobility and weight. The only problem with PDAs for the disabled is that they tend to be fairly flimsy, so they're not so good for people with poor motor control.
Just a few examples:
;)
1. want to use the music playback device for music playback on a party. Put my precious address data and phone there and leave it alone the whole evening? Probably not!
2. I use my iPod shuffle when riding the bike. Hell, you know how often you can drop anything you cary when riding a bike? Of course breaking an iPod is bad enough, but at least I still can use my phone and access by precious address data (there's a lot of money in there)
Of course I can (and do) backup the data and get a new device. But using different devices is much more flexible. And I don't care about carrying two or three little ones with me. (right now, mostly an iPod shuffle, a Palm Vx and a Siemens ME45 cellphone).
Modern phones are totally stupid, all those features that nobody (except children and some strange people who usually put big audio systems in crap cars) wants just eat up battery power.
What a mad world
The most common response thus far is that the PDA 'interface' is lacking. I have to agree for the most part, but this is only one of the limiting factors.
I've owned a metric crapload of electronic gadgets, from the dollar store electronic organizers to wi-fi enabled PDAs, cell phones for the last 10 years (I change my phone about twice a year, I'm a sucker for features), and mp3 players from when 128 megs was a lot, to present day. I think I have a pretty good idea of the success and failings in many of these portable devices.
In regards to interface, you can only fit so much into a device that small anyway (as far as means of input). Voice input sucks, dinky keyboards suck, and handwriting input takes up a fair bit of screen realestate, and usually sucks. Having a method of input is neccessary to a point, but I think it's a 'last resort' sort of thing.
The only thing the device itself needs to be really good at is output. If I need to see an appointment, or listen to music, or recal a memo, etc. THAT needs to be easily accessable. You want to surf the web? Type documents? Watch videos? Get a laptop, tablet, or OQO.
This brings me to the problem of price. Ever look at the cost of these devices? You can buy a laptop or a desktop computer for the cost of these devices. Both are better at EVERYTHING, accept being portable. So you buy a $50 MP3 player, or whatever, and a pad of paper, and use some remote terminal access for emergencies when you forget an important document at home or whatever.
I think 'useful general purpose portable devices' (UGPPDs?) should concentrate on being useful when you're carrying them around, but interface with something better when you're at home/work/wherever with access to a better terminal. Don't tell me about 'active sync' or whatever, it still needs a fair bit of work, and the 'getting what I want back out' part is still weak. When I want to carry info around with me, I print it out, fold it up, and put it in my pocket, because it's easier for me. And I'm a power user! Think of how non-technical people must feel.
I just got what I think will be my last cell phone for some time. It fits the bill for everything I need, and most of what I have discussed. The nokia 6230 ( I do not work for nokia, or any phone company at all ). It has a good calendar/scheduler with alarms etc. It synchronizes with outlook (yeah, microsoft product, I need to use it, get over it), via bluetooth whenever I go near my computer. The input is there if I need it, but again, is only so good (although I still need to look into the nokia pen thing, which might be really cool, then again, see my notes about handwriting recognition sucking). The output is great. It allows me to get to whatever I want quickly and easily. It also plays Mp3s and takes VGA pictures quite handily. The price is good with a cell contract, or if you get it used. It has adequately replaced my PDA, MP3 player, and... er... old cell phone. Considering I never carry my camera with me I guess that's covered too. And the best part? It looks like a phone! You know what I'm talking about. It just looks goofy to hold your PDA to your ear.
I think PDAs in their current incarnation are basically useless. I think a cellphone with a large and/or upgradable quantity of storage, a reasonable ability to access vital data, and a wireless docking interface of some sort that you can use with public and/or private interface terminals, is the ultimate evolution of ubiquitous data availability.
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.
Give me 40 GB and decent audio output on a PDA and I don't think I'd bother carting a player around with me as well.
'Course.. ubiquitous wi-fi and a route back to my media server at home would make local storage a moot point against it's network based equivalent.
PDAs have not failed at all, although in the US they are not that prevalent. Look at a country like Taiwan; one in 5 people have a Dopod -- a $900 PDA -- rather than an iPod.
Personally, I love the idea of a PDA that does Wifi (for Vonage and Skype) and GSM all in one device smaller than an iPod Mini. This was a horribly biased article and clearly not representative of the world.
Although they started out with amazingly poor quality, I think camera phones are doing quite well even though their marketing is laughable. I never remember to bring a camera, but I am never without my cellphone. Since I have had my cellphone, I've taken a hundred pictures just because of a striking view or to chronical a good time. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
On top of that, you've got folks with video and camera phones recording raw footage at the scenes of disasters, political events, disastrous political events, etc... As the resolution gets better, and the bandwidth higher, we will have more and more chance to take off the corporate filters of traditional news coverage, and see the world as it is, from they eyes of fellow human beings.
A camera that is uploading as it captures cannot have its film confiscated.
I know what it is. Crappy tiny ram. Crappy small or non existent hds. No media card slots till recently. No audio jack with volume control.
put those things in and a software media player and pdas would smoke.
Why spend $300 on a machine that only holds 32 megs of data in memory?
We want gigs. And usb plug and play into any pc just like the new media players.
Because pda's were useful in business they have been way overpriced and under featured.
Just like the tablets. They're a great idea! But their specs are 2 years old so why would anyone bother? Make em with a gig of ram, an smokin vid card and a 200 g hd with wifi and uxga screen and those things would take off.
The average person isn't busy enough to need a PDA. I use my iPod as a PDA because all I need to do is track my schedule/contacts/etc... while I'm away, I don't really have much need to enter something new.
Plus the interface of the iPod jus simply kicks ass with it's elegance.
mikejz84: I am curious what PocketPC PDA you have?
I am a very happy Dell AXIM owner and see no need in an Ipod or other such nonsence, With my 1gig CF Card I can hold as much music or movies as I need. (Not to mention the SD Slot as well)
However, the ability to open product databases, excel spreadsheets, PDF files and SURF THE WEB wirelessly serve me better than any Ipod EVER could!
-One wish for Pocket PC add-ons: A usb slot so I can transfer files to and from my portable HD straight to my AXIM.
I can play my MP3's. Use an FM transmitter to get it on my truck stereo
Play DVD's
TV shows
Read books
Sync with Avantgo for news
Sync with stocks, movie times, weather
Use it as a universal remote
Track finances
write documents in word using thumb keyboard
surf web
email
IM
Games - Including Age of Empires!
You can do so much with these things. It only lacks high amounts of storage but this has never been an issue for me. Why the hell does anyone need to take 80gb of music with them?! You can't listen to that much music in a month! Just sync with a playlist and out the door you go. You have music for the day.
And my battery life is easily 8 hours+. I also carry a backup battery with me and a car charger. It's never been an issue.
That is, you didn't have wifi at first, while mobile devices were designed for mobile communication (primarily speech). And while you can buy cell phone for a dime, you can't get a fully gsm/wifi capable pad for that price.
I've experienced that iPods are more often toys or tools of entertainment while the PDA is more work-related in its use. Typically, delivery-boys, truckers and such use PDAs for signing the necessary paperwork, while iPods are (in my regard) mostly a tool for entertainment or gaining social acceptance.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
As I see it, the new iPod has increased battery life, it's a bit thinner and has a little larger display. Beyond that, it's the exact same device it's always been and functions the exact same way it always has -- except that it'll play some video now.
You're right, in theory. The iPod added video capability without increasing the price or changing the basic functionality of the ipod. Some things, of course are changed, small things like no transfer over FW (Apple has glitchy USB 2.0 support on some machines) and the lack of remote functionality on the iPod's specialized headphone connector (now, it's dock-only).
But the real proof is in the tasting of the pudding. What I mean by this is that if people perceive that the video experience of iPod is not very useful and it becomes a vestigial function, then people will irrationally perceive that the iPod has lower value than an earlier iPod that doesn't do video. Part of this will be due to the fact that people will be lured to the new iPod by the video functionality but will find out it's not what they hoped. In particular, people may reject the video on the iPod because there is no easy way for users to produce video content for the iPod. Sure, some people will buy a bunch of $2.00 shows, but that novelty will wear off fast.
However, if I'm wrong and people do buy TV shows and music video like they do hotcakes, then the video iPod will probably be very successful. But without massive video iTMS sales, the fact that the iPod does not allow users to easily create/acquire content outside of commercial distribution channels may scratch the pristine surface of the iPod's reputation.
My guess is that Apple is working on a version of iMovie that will practically beam video content into your new video iPod and so the video iPod will revolutionize video consumption just as the iPod (r)evolutionized music-listening.
blog
IF Microsoft put a full operating system in
their PDA PocketPC boxes, i would find them
more operationally useable.
i use mine but seriously important
functions have not been implemented.
can you FILE SAVE in PocketPC verse?
Pda's lack the ability to write on them like paper.
Instead you have to learn a new language! (graffiti)
hand writing recongnition went out with the newton era, and no pda i've seen in 5 years has had it.
I refuse to type on a tiny keyboard or learn a new set of symbols because these pda companies are too cheap to include text recognition software.
instead i use paper.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Bingo.
I've been needing a PDA for a long time for my personal life as well as for work (my short-term memory is useless thanks to ADHD). I looked at what my coworkers were using, and realized that most of them left their PDA in the filing cabinet, thereby completely negating the "instant on" ability. As it turns out, I was also fed up with my cell company (both the equipment and the customer service were poor) and wanted to switch to GSM so I'd be able to get my phone unlocked and take it with me when I travel and use prepaid SIM cards to avoid paying international roaming charges. I started looking at the Treo 650 but ended up getting an iPAQ 6325.
I could have bought a small cell phone, but it would have been so difficult to use the PIM features I'd still want a PDA, and the PDA would be so bulky I'd never have it with me when I needed it.
Having the cell phone built into the PDA is both the carrot and the stick - I'm forced to carry the PDA around in order to have a telephone, and that means I get more value from the PDA because I actually have it when I need to use it.
Others have pointed out that the iPod is a dedicated device and Apple has made it easy to use. It goes beyond the device. Apple provides, through iTunes and the iPod, a fully integrated experience. Since they control all aspects, from the client to the store to the device and the DRM, they can provide a seamless and simple experience.
They also are not religuous about the Web and browser and recognized what we all know: rich media is inherently a desktop experience and desktop clients can be far richer than web apps (Yes, AJAX is great, but...). So iTunes is your portal. It uses the web as a data source, may display some stuff in HTML, but it is a desktop client that is quick and simple and totally integrated with the device.
The other options all involve multiple parties using some kind of standard (even is a proprietary standard like MS). This means that different people do different things and the integraiton isn't as good, the pieces can not count on each other, etc.
It is all about the end ot end integraiton of the experience.
ok, well here it is, you want a portable device that can play every form of media as your PC, allows you to do anything that your pc can do? the most easy to use portable device, able to use every wireless network including cisco leap networks and such? great viewable screen with ports to connect it to every other portable device from every brand name plus the functionality to hook it to a tv and speakers and use it to watch movies? the ability to run every single application that you have for your PC on it? well in america, our space limitations are few and far between.. so in america just get a laptop.. its the best portable device for all the above reasons.. even if you live in japan they make super small laptops that you can use.. why own a PDA? the prices for PDAs are getting up there and the prices on laptops are falling.. a laptop can do EVERYTHING any pda in the world can do.
The only PDA that seems to be making alot of hype are blackberries and Danger Inc.'s hiptop/sidekick. I think the future of PDAs are going to be moble messenger devices with cellphone functionality, and desktops are going to be fading out.. maybe not in the near future.. but laptops are really getting better and better.. as more companies give upgrade incentives on laptops.. i can see docking stations coming back into modern use.. IMHO the only reason desktops are still in use is because of PC gaming and the need to upgrade your video card every 6 months.. but as video gaming has been slowly but surely losing its hold on the PC market and migrating entirely to console systems.. i dont see why everyone isnt going to own a laptop as their desktop PC over the next 15-20 years. As that happens i believe the tiny laptops will be viewed as more of a PDA of sorts.. and the big screen multimedia laptops are going to start getting better.. they'll get good quality speakers and crisper plasma screens.. they'll become HD multimedia devices.. i could even see people having 2 docking stations for their laptop.. one on their entertainment center and one on their desk.
just think about these things and tell me what you think.. doesnt it seem sensable?
In my previous jobs I used a PDA constantly. had customer lists in it, commonly used part numbers, and a bunch of other stuff. I now work in an environment that I can not connect anything to my computer. Therefore, I can not get information to the PDA. People here use paper day-timers. I had never used one in my life and am still having a hard time adjusting.[p] The culture here is just to not use computers (people look at me like I am from another planet when I mention email, or the assume it is porn because it is the internet and we all know the internet is porn). hen I asked for palm manager to b put on my computer the answer was not only no; but I was also put on the list of people to check for hacking activity on a regular basis. Putting things in the windows startup folder or on the server is considered hacking.[p] As much as I hate using a day-timer and prefer that PDA, there is just no way I can use one in the culture of secutity fear and ignorance that I work in.
"Why can't I buy *just a phone*? You can. There are lots of nice *tiny* ones with no features. I have the Panasonic A100, for example. No camera, black and white screen; but the battery lasts forever, it works great, and it can fit anywhere. It's GSM, so in the US that means you need T-Mobile or Cingular (I believe). But the rest of the world it will work with no complications. Froogle: Panasonic A100
The same questions can be asked of Archos. I don't think they were the first to release portable MP3 players, or even portable hard-disk players. Nonetheless, they had a multi-gigabyte HD MP3 device back in 2001 that even recorded to 256K VBR MP3. They had a portable video player even before Creative. Their prices weren't even outrageous.
So why don't they have a bigger piece of the market? I think the answers are the same as the PDA question: marketing, brand recognition, style, and even timing. They were ahead of their time, offering multi-gigabyte when people weren't even buying sub-100 MB in big quantities. Apple delivered something people were looking for right when they realized they were looking for it, and indeed Apple's marketing made people realize that they WERE looking for it.
Some of you already have those cute little shirts on that say disco sucks, right? That's not all that sucks.-Frank Zappa
can you figure out how to post it to australia:) i would love one to mess about, esp if it has wireless network ability
The ipod video has a 60 gig Hard Drive. How many palm pcs or PDAs have Hard Drive? That's there problem.
Pda's survive in a world of iPods in the same way that some people loved DOS and windows 3.1.
All the microsoft products run windows: yuck.
None of the PDA's have the capacity of the iPod, or the design or the integrated sales and distribution plus pod casts and all.
I have a Dell Axiom Pda... it is powerful, but I use it almost never. I use paper and pencil. It is nasty as a skype device (quality, human factors), nasty to navigate, nasty for internet...
Those devices simply are not designed: they do things.
In the spririt of "I would have written less but I didn't have the time" it takes genius to make something simple. And even if you do, simple just reeks of feminine and that scares a lot of boys away.
The iPod has a calendar and address book; hook up a voice recorder and you can dictate stuff you can type in later. Why have a PDA if you can have a device that is also a usable backup hard drive and plays music (and now video)?
Why do so many people prefer to buy a $5,000 rolex than a $20 Casio, when the casio can do far more, is much more accurate, and doesn't stop working when you put it down for more than a day? If you take a look at the wrist of the typical pocket PC user, you are far more likely to find a functional, inexpensive watch than a status symbol. If you take a look at a guy carrying an ipod, i can GURANTEE he will not be wearing a Casio. I cannot understand the mindset of someone who buys a Rolex, just like I do not understand the mindset of someone who buys an Ipod. A couple of years back I bought a $5,000 watch, because I had the money and was sick of hearing from my friend "you have to own one to understand". Well, 6 months later, it was on Ebay. I was even more confused than ever why someone with money would want to own a watch that has to be reset whenever you put it down for more than a day. (and please, don't try to explain it to me, I've heard it all before and it still makes no sense to me.) I wear a $200 citizen on my wrist that tells the time in unlimited time zones that I can program in, has a stopwatch, day, date, two alarms, coundown timer, and both an analog and digital display. I use many of the functions regularly. To me, only someone with an inferior mind would ever own a rolex or an ipod. To them, I am probably seen as a nerd. Just like you could never convince the in-crowd in high school to spend their time at a computer club meeting instead of the mall, you could never convince them today to own a pocket PC. The point I am making is that this discussion should not be about failings of the pocket PC, but rather some core psycological differences that different people have. My honest take is that Ipod and rolex owners have weaker minds, so they buy things they can easily undersand (ipod), and own expensive watches to compensate for their mental failings.
As were Sony Walkmans for example.
But Sony Walkwman started atrend: portable music players.
MP3 players are a trend: music can now be distributed electronically only, no physical media is strictily necessary. iPods are the most obvious manifestation of that, but they will not remain the only device doing electronic distribution of music in such big scale.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... PDAs are for teenagers?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
See I think guy nailed it when he mentioned the learning curve on a PPC. People complaining about the storage -- honestly a 2GB CF card costs like 90 bucks these days and fits 20+ albums which is fine by me. The problem is there's tons of great software out there you just need to know what it is. At school the other day I couldn't find my profs class, so I whip out the PPC, open up my VOIP app and call my roomies to double check. Alternately on the front page I have updated weather information for my hometown, university, etc as well as recent news streamed through RSS. I hit one button to open my mp3 player and hit that same button to turn the screen off while it plays, giving me ~6 hours battery life listening to music -- enough to get me to lecture, where I use a bluetooth keyboard that fits in my pocket to type class notes. If I'm looking at fooling around my X50V can run Playstation games at close to full speed as well as gameboy advance, snes, etc. Not to mention I also use it as a digital guitar tuner, photo viewer (just pop in your camera's memory card and bam), internet browser which is suprisingly good at scaling pages, MSN client, and can play H264 video along with basically every other format. Pocket streets allows me to figure out where I'm going when I go up to Toronto etc and is great for pinpointing and marking landmarks and looking up addresses. And that's not getting into the great PDF support and full-featured word processor Textmaker I use for notes. Did I mention it has built software for controlling my home computer via terminal services client, useful when I forget something at home and need to send it to myself on the PDA. Again it's taken a few months to get a grasp on the unit but now I could honestly set anyone else's up in a hour. If you have someone to show you the ropes these devices in incredibly useful and fairly stable if you tweak them right. iPods have their place but right now my Dell Axim beats the hell out of any other unit for functionality and value.
I have a PDA and don't use it, except for accessing the internet from the kitchen or logging into my linux box when X has gone AWOL.
...That wouldn't be so bad if WinCE didn't, loose all settings (even the date and time!!!), loose anything that you store to VRAM (the default setting is to store documents in VRAM and not NVRAM), had a usefull web browser, had a usefull file browser, has a usefull media player, hand-writing recognition worked, word recognition actually learned the words you used and dropped the ones you didn't, came with a JVM, didn't install applications to VRAM, didn't require a Windows Desktop to use properly ... Was anything apart from WinCE.
/etc in NVRAM, that way I save 1 days battery life not having to set everything up and install it all again.
1: When it's on charge there's an annoying red light, even when it's switch off and charging.
2: After it's charged the battery life is only a couple of days.....
3:
WinCE is just the most annoying OS (if it is an OS) that I have ever seen or used, they even re-wrote it and it was still shit.
I may try an install Linux on my PDA and set it up so it keeps thing like settings by pussing
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I wouldn't like to say marketing, but it appears mostly so. Okay, so PDA's have been around for a long time offering all these functions, whether or not they work well. The iPod however has been around a short time, offering less functionality, whether or not it works well. But there are other players as well. When we for instance look at IAudio's X5, which has been around for almost a year now, you see Ipod video's functionality surpassed, with the same size and ease of use, and for less money too. Why are they not surpassing the iPod sales? It's a marketing issue. Your neighbor has a sleek and fancy iPod, so you want one too. If the same marketing tactics were employed for the PDA's, which are mostly targeted at grey business users, they would start selling a lot more. Apparently all the PDA manufacturers have mistook the private consumer market for 'irrelevant', and targeted all their sales at the people that they think they were designing for. Having a fun little electronic device that does all kinds of fancy stuff has become mostly a product for the average consumer, and no longer that for the business user. Apple got their foot in the door, and now has market advantages that other producers could only dream of, whether or not their product is better, cheaper or is released months before the much beefed up marketing campaign for the new iPod even starts.
Several points to consider. Foremost being "jack of all trades, master of none." All too of the PDA devies attempt to do everything and miss the mark every time. They just fail to focus on getting core tasks done well. REALLY well.
Comparison to single purpose device like an iPod is a little disingenuous. The iPod's a music app on an embedded device. It's best feature is the desktop sync. Too bad the Newton folks never listened to sense and made that actually work. Since it's so eff'ing slow to sync it handles recharging quite well. The user know it's take foreeeeeever to load all the tunes up so they leave the thing attached and go do something else. A PDA user, otoh, tends to need to keep using the device so syncing and charging really disrupts them. That and nobody's bothering to make a decent bluetooth cradle that could live on your bedroom dresser and do it's sync'ing automagically with the PC down the hall. Again, missing the mark on doing real world tasks WELL.
But the deeper problem is look who you've got making the PDAs; programmers. These are people WITHOUT lives that would require this sort of device! It's like asking a deaf guy to make you a violin (no insult intended to the hearing impaired, of course, it's just an analogy). It might look right, feel right, weight exactly the same amount, hell, even crunch the same when you sit on it. But dollars to doughnuts bets it sure as hell won't sound right, thus missing the mark on it's intended purpose. Asking people without lives to make 'lifestyle devices' is similarly insane. And yet, that's what we're getting.
And don't overlook the technological hurdles. Making a device like an iPod last for 8 hours or so is one thing. It doesn't have to keep a touchscreen fired up and since it's not really showing much detail on the screen it can shut off that backlight pretty quick. A PDA, on the other hand, is spending a lot more of it's watts on actually dealing with user interaction (poorly, of course...) But things have come a long way in the past decade and it's likely to continue to improve.
The crappy devices we have today are just traction on the muddy road leading to tomorrow's 'less crappy' devices. But without them the industry won't get enough traction to move.
Surely touch-screen tech isn't dead with PDAs? Is it still a viable interface, or too powerhungry/fragile?
I-pod may have honed the profitable art of doing one thing well, but surely touchscreens give the ability to have a completely customisable interface, making it potentially superior.
OK I saw all of the other posts but honestly the devices we are talking about are selling largely to the under 20 demographic that is completely driven by marketing dollars. When you can buy an old PocketPC 2003 device on eBay for $75-100 that does everything and more than an iPod w/ WiFi/Bluetooth and the killer is it is an INFINITELY - INFINITELY better portable MP3/WMA device there is no other reason than that the target audience is simply not even entertaining this device as an option. I am a musician and audiophile and my PPC device allows me the flexibility of SD & CF card storage and playback software that provides MP3/WMA/Ogg-Vorbis/MPC/MP4-AAC and other formats along with dynamic bass enhancement and 10 band graphic EQ along with countless other options and also allows for new audio formats to be supported when they become more popular. What's more even the old throw away PPC2002/2003 devices have WiFi so I use the thing as a portable digital music player anywhere in my house and connect to my 120GB music database on my main server PC. I have a 512MB SD card pd $15 after rebate and 2GB CF card $45 after rebate so 2.5GB of storage is pretty reasonable although small by current player standards. So for me clearly there is no comparison in terms of the quality of the audio output and playback options on the device. But the reality is that this is more of a "geek solution" than a mass market solution to the portable music need. I liken it to linux vs windows popularity in the OS market. I am pretty much a die-hard fan now of PDA/Phone/Media Player convergent devices and could never envision buying a device that did not include all of these features in a single device.
This so difficult to use a PDA with a STYLUS (Palm or PPC), or a TREO with a STYLUS + BUTTONS or a HP IPAQ 4700 with a TOUCHPAD, or a Nintendo DS with a FINGERSTALL-STYLUS, or all the others with theirs very small keyboards. The solution is the THUMB, and only iPod understand that. With vertical device one thumb on scrollwheel. With landscape device 2 thumbs on screen. No wheel, no button, no keyboards, no graffiti, no stylus...just the screen. The best pocket device idea is the Jackito, only the thumbs for all uses : Search&Select like iPod (music, photos, video) and run all appli (games, calcul, texts, etc...). The company is a small and young 'garage company' but they already sell devices for vertical uses.