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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?"
average people don't need all that stuff, plus they're not cool
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
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.
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.
...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
Because they're mainly features to sell the device.
Picture messaging is gimmicky, but some people actually find it useful. And since it's still a telephony/communications tool, it makes sense to embed it into a cellphone. Video games, never understood it myself, but some people enjoy playing the games on the diminutive screen, in waiting rooms, elevators, etc. Text messaging; again, it's very inline with what a cellphone's intended purpose is to be - to help people communicate while on the move. Instead of having to communicate verbally, you can write the message and send it, thus avoiding distburbing classes, and talking about subjects you otherwise wouldn't be able to verbally.
I think the matra should be "The Spirit of the Device". What is the devices intended purpose? How can we make that purpose better, how can we expand upon the product with similar purposes to broaden its use for people who otherwise wouldn't buy our product? (on that note; I've seen deaf people use cellphones. Text Messaging is a definite boon). In the case of a PDA, the spirit just isn't there; a PDA is a catchall device. In a lot of minds, "a solution looking for a problem". If you can find a use for it, you'd buy it, but many simply can't find a use for it. Hell, I recieved a PDA as a re-gift from a friend; "I can't figure out how to use and even if I did I doubt I'd be able to find a use for it".
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
1) Because people are going to carry a cell phone anyway, and it's pretty hard to find one that doesn't come with a thousand superfluous extras. Having them there doesn't mean people use them, all, though, whereas you wouldn't buy a PDA unless you did have a use for most of what it does.
2) Phone companies pay a large proportion of the actual device cost as a way of attracting customers. IMO most popular phones would have a lot less in the way of in-built extras if customers had to pay the full retail cost, and the one with cameras and other stuff cost $600 versus a basic model for $80.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
Well, it's not 60GB, but I have managed to hook up a 20GB drive to my Zaurus SL-C860 with a homemade CF-IDE adaptor. The drive came courtesy of my Rio Riot MP3 player, since it decided to erupt in a cloud of smoke when I plugged it in once (fortunately only the power regulation section of the board was damaged; the drive was perfectly fine). When I don't feel like lugging that mess around, the 5GB microdrive from a Rio Carbon holds plenty enough music, video, games, and various other forms of entertainment. All in all, I've shelled out more that a kilobuck on the whole setup, but that's a small price to pay when being able to rock out with XMMS while editing images with the Gimp while on the go*.
*though you probably don't want to because of the limited RAM and having to set up a swap on external media- it's slow as hell, but impressive nonetheless.
Of course, I like having all of these features. Ninety-nine percent of people don't give a crap about all of this- all they want to do is press a button and listen to the song they want to hear. If they want to play video, they'd rather do it with an iPod than have to mess around with some hard-to-use videoplayer on their PDA. It's as simple as that.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
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...
Actually...
Palm has a very good reason to keep the Lifedrive expenseive -- it keeps out the "I want to try this" folk, which lets them reduce the number of bugs that crop up. And, oh yes, the lifedrive does have bugs. Not enough to keep my wife from loving it more than she ever loved any PDA I showed her, but enough to keep, say, my friends from picking one up.
But the real falsehood in your reply is economics. Palm's cheap PDAs are where they make their money. Their biggest sellers and most revenue come from the bottom part of their market segment -- the part that really is "just a really good organizer."
And ITMS was created to sell iPods, not the other way around.
By definition a PDA is ambiguous. Its a Personal Digital Assistant. Which could mean alot of things but generally mean Calendar/Schedule, Notes, Email, and Contact Addresses/Phone Numbers. These three features should be the main focus of a PDA but for some reason are still not being done well. PDAs are also getting bogged down on extra fluff when their main functions aren't perfect. A phone wouldn't be worth it if its main function of being a phone were crap, despite all its cool extra features.
A warrior keeps death in the mind at all times from the moment of his first breath to the moment of his last.
Quote: Why can't I buy *just a phone*? The original Motorola V (not the current bloated monster) and the Nokia 2110 were pretty much the perfect mobile phones: it's all been downhill since then.
:D.
Response: You can, go with Nextel Service. They have an awesome network (I have been all over the country and 9 times out of 10 have a better signal than anybody around me), and they have very simple phones like the i530 which is the most durable phone on the market (I ran it over with my 3500lb Chevy Suburban and not a thing wrong with it). Plus you get the Direct Connect
Honestly I really love my Samsung i730 pocket PC phone.
The phone quality is IMO excellent; it is far clearer than any cell phone I've ever owned. So at the very least it ties with standalone phones.
The mp3 player I have installed (pocket music player) is great too. The only thing that it lacks is space: I have only a 1gig SD card. However, my desktop music jukebox autosynchs, so I get new mp3s with little effort. So the ipod wins here, but the samsung is adequate.
The video (betaplater, now called TCPMP) is excellent as well, and it is perfect for watching episodes of futurama or firefly while I'm waiting. Encoding is a breeze as well with pocket dvd studio. I'm not sure if you can easily encode your own DVDs or tv shows with the PSP or ipod, so I'm going to put the win with pocket pc until I find out otherwise.
Games are adequate. The PSP and gameboy clearly beat it, but there are a few fun games for the pocket pc. Enough so I really don't need to carry around a seperate gaming device. Age of Empires, Skyforce, and Warfare Inc are all great games, amongst others.
So really, I have no reason to carry around an ipod, PSP, PDA, and phone. My device does it all adequatly enough so that I don't have to. The newest pocket PC Treo may be even better.
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.]"
Going full circle.. remember dejanews? It did usenet -> web, and did it well. Everyone used it.
Then a bunch of marketing execs got together and said "Everyone's looking at our site! I know... let's rename it to a 'portal', fill it with advertising and all sorts of extra features. Oh, and get rid of those boring news pages."
They went bust. Very fast (within 6 months IIRC).
google bought up the remains and now do what dejanews did originally... and they're very successful at it.
Much of what you say is, indeed, spot on. I had a knee-jerk reaction after reading the question posed -- the guy must be kiddin': iPods in the same price range as a decent PDA come with at least (now) 40 gigs of space, not measly 128/256MBs like your standard-issue PDA. Sure, you can expand it by plugging an SD or MMC card -- but not by much, not even into the region of a Nano.
I always find it so very amusing that for its time Palm IIIx was awesome -- with only 8MBs (eight!) it could do everything that my T5 can, sans browse the web (and I could do even that in an off-line mode had I *really* wanted to). But T5 has much more capable CPU (Dragonball 33MHz vs. XScale 416MHz), much more memory, much bigger screen -- why can't I get as much out of it?! And don't even get me started on reliability of IIIx vs. T5.
And then my iPod -- it does not try to do much more than it is designed for -- a music player (ok, now also a video player -- but I think the vPod was a bad move). It does have features to read books, store my phonebook/addresses and a basic calendaring thingy, yet these are there only because there is a spare place on that 80Gb hard drive, not like the case of a T5 with a bloody RealPlayer that sucks up the place I personally would have rather used to put TPCMP on.
Take another specially targetted device: BlackBerry. I used to think they were a fad -- who needs that tiny little box with tiny buttons and a barely readable screen to look at the emails in the wee hour of the night? I still think that people punching BB keys any time they have at least 30 seconds look ridiculous. However, now that I used one I can concede -- for the task it was designed for (instant email wherever you go) it is *very* capable. Much more so than Palm or PocketPC -- that tiny little keyboard makes a lot of difference. Starngely enough I would feel much more inclined to write a longer piece out on my Palm with a stilos, rather than on a Blackberry, yet it is mostly because longer piece is likely to be written somewhere wher I can sit and hold a Palm with *two* hands, while a brief reply to a business email on a BlackBerry can be done on the run and with just one hand.
And then -- all singing, all dancing cell phones. All these jokes of uber appliance that in many cases can't do their main task right... Why building in an MP3 player with some cool visual effects on a tiny 1" screen? To ensure that your little pocket monster that barely lasts a day without a recharge drains itself of all the juice by the time you get to work?
--AP
What about the trendiness factor? If you have an iPod, you're cool.
And, girls get out of class, and half of them whip out their phones for a quick chat between classes. Most of them have trouble operating a PC. What would they do with a PDA?
Me? I don't leave the house (besides work and school) enough to warrant carrying a very breakable, very expensive object around with me.
I'd rather drag along a GBA than a PDA. Better games, I'm never around a WiFi connection anyway, and I don't need to bring videos and my entire music collection everywhere with me.
The whole $80.00 for a new GBA-SP doesn't hurt anything, either.
And, really, doesn't anybody else here still carry paperbacks around?
**crickets chirping**
Stupid PDFs.
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.
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.
My wife owns an iPod Shuffle and a 40GB 4G iPod and the comparison between those and my O2 XDA IIs PocketPC highlights why Apple is walking away with the market. The expense and add-on nature of the tiny 1GB card on my Aus$1200 PocketPC compared to the 40GB hard disk in the Aus$400 iPod is shameful. However, that is the least of the issues. Add in the following Windows Mobile PDA problems and the picture becomes much clearer.
;-)
:-)
- Windows Mobile 2003 SE is not as good a phone OS as Symbian UiQ running on my P900. Accessing contacts to phone someone is not as intuitive and takes a lot more fiddling.
- Windows Mobile is also not as good a PDA GUI as the Palm OS. Putting a "Start Menu" on the PDA in a vain attempt to emulate Windows XP results in a GUI that is much more awkward than the simple icon based Palm interface that my previous Palm III PDA used.
- Slow downs and freezes. My PocketPC froze often enough for me to need to pull the battery off the back to restart (the power or reset buttons wouldn't work) about twice a week, before I updated the firmware. It seems to have improved somewhat though it still suffers slow-downs requiring me to quit all running applications.
- One occurrence that I think might have been caused by ActiveSynch, but could have been an Exchange problem was the case where I lost almost all of my Outlook calendar entries from Exchange (on my desktop PC and my Mac) over a weekend while my IIs still had all the entries - once I synched the PDA all the entries on the PDA were also wiped. It was very frustrating.
- Volatile local storage. MS should be shot for designing these devices to erase all local storage (including user data AND all settings requiring a complete re-install of apps, personal settings etc) if the battery goes flat! Neither my Newton PDA nor my Palm ever suffered from such a poor design.
- Firmware updates. Again who ever heard of a PDA needing to be completely set up from scratch again if you update the firmware. Pathetic.
- Forced lesson in how to use the pen every time you re-initialise the device. You should not be forced to "click and drag" on simulated diary entries every time you re-install because your battery went flat! - it should be optional. I want to strangle the MS team who designed this "feature".
- Forced hardware upgrades. Being able to upgrade the version of the OS on the device isn't necessarily guaranteed - I understand a lot of Windows Mobile 2003 devices can't be upgraded to Second Edition.
- It's another play by Microsoft for world domination.
Now if Apple had only continued developing the original Newton which coined the name PDA and whose OS is *still* amazingly in advance of most current contenders in many ways - well the story might be a bit different....
-Mart