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Pen-Based PDA Market on Death Bed
An anonymous reader writes "The traditional pen-based PDA market is destined to evaporate within the next four years, according to HP, and it will be focusing its handheld efforts on converged smart phone devices, such as its latest BlackBerry rivals unveiled this week -- the iPAQ rw6800 and the iPAQ hw6900." From the article: "This won't come as a surprise to many, as HP hasn't given its traditional pen-based product line a refresh since the launch of the iPAQ hx4700 towards the middle of 2004. It released the iPAQ rx1950 in September of last year, but this was very much an entry-level product and made few waves among the high-end, tech-savvy consumers that dominate the PDA segment."
Pen Based PDA's will be replaced by better tablet pcs.
I am not sure why they have not caught on a lot more, they offer tons on functionality, and decent uptimes.
Take handwritten notes and have them stored in digital format stored immediately?
Why not?
Windows? I haven't used that since 1999. Fix the Slashdot Problems
Fine, get out of the market. Just please, someone stay in. I'd be lost without my PDA, and I don't want a 'smartphone'. I want something I can reference while holding the phone...
'Sensible' is a curse word.
not all of us WANT all in one devices. I like my phone, MP3 player, and PDA being separate devices. If one breaks I'm not screwed three times over.
... and I can't stand it. I could enter data incredibly fast with one hand with pen on the palm, with the treo I have to fumble using those stupid small keyboards, which takes two hands and is very, very , very slow compared to just writing something with the pen. I have just about given up on entering any data into the thing because it is so difficult. I want a palm phone with no keyboard. I guess I'll be going back to my regular old palm and separate phone though.
Most people NEVER needed a PDA anyway - a calendar and addressbook in a mobile is enough for most people.
Plus many modern PDAs cost almost as much as a small / low budget laptop. Why bother buying an expensive gizmo if you can the real thing for a bit more? Also subsidized smart phones from network operators will always be cheaper as 'unconnected' PDAs.
So in the future we will only have even smarter phones and mini notebooks. PDAs will be gone - they were an evolutionary step to the new offsprings.
PDAs are slowly going the way of the pager.
As soon as you have devices that do everything a PDA does, but better and still cheap, the PDA as it is now will disappear. The problem is a lot of these devices now try to do everything, but don't do anything well (and they're expensive). Once that begins to change, it will be no surprise.
That's what i thought the origami was going to be. Why not have a blackberry-type device which is super easy to use, works perfectly with Exchange, and has all the cool pen-based pda functionality. As long as they could pull it off without being cumbersome, i think it would work. Thats why some devices succeed and some fail: crappy ones are too cumbersome to actually use.
Han shot first.
the high-end, tech-savvy consumers
Do you mean the early adopters who are willing to spend way to much on a piece of kit so they can flaunt their technical superiority? I wear a watch, I carry a planner and I have a pen. My watch is self winding (yes, it is even an analog watch), I recharge my planner once a year (calendar refils) and a pen is always at hand. I guess that just leaves the effort of finding the correct date and writing something down. Oh, and manually checking the schedule.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
The PDA (personal digital assistant) is simply changing shape. It's called the cellphone. We need our cellphones. Take a look at Japanese cellphones. They are used as e-wallets, garage door openers, gym membership verifiers, 3 way video conference communicators, and so on. With the advent of e-ink and flexible display technology, we can expect larger screens with higher resolution and lower power consumption that roll out. Take a look at the images at e-ink.com. The PDA is not dead. The personal digital assistant is simply changing shape to accommodate the needs of people the world round.
In theory a PDA should have been a threat to the IPOD as well. IT's clear the IPOD's selling point isn't functionality per se.
My ppc plays videos and music (via a 1 gig sd card). I also have bluetooth (used mostly for DUN) - Wifi. I can do basical word processing and spreadsheet functions - surf the web, read ebooks, play games, skype, instant message... just a wide range of things at a cost on par with and in some instances below the cost of an IPOD.
Origami is going to need cool factor and the right price point to be effective because feature filled handhelds are already here - and no one wants them.
un burrito me trampeó.
Just like how the mobile phone was going to replace the handheld video game system in a few years. Or how desktops were going to be replaced by laptops, or how laptops were going to be replaced by tablet PCs.
Some people just don't want a PDA with a monthly subscription fee attached.
At least if PDAs are losing to tablets, I haven't seen evidence of this.
It is more true that PDAs are losing to converged devices, but I think that's only half the story. What I think really is happening is that PDAs are being bracketed by laptops on one end and converged/feature rich phones on the other. Everybody who might use a PDA is almost certainly carrying a laptop and a phone that if it isn't "converged", it is practically so in all but name.
Personally, I don't think either fits the true PDA niche, which is about form factor. A true PDA is larger than any reasonable phone would be, but fits in your shirt pocket without stretching it or making it sag. To some degree the PDA manufacturers have brought this on themselves, blurring their market niche by making the PDAs more desktop like in their power; WinCE bears a lot of the blame for this. It's the classic tendency to want to blur your market position to get more sales. You pick up a few sales on the edges, at the cost of losing clarity as to why the customer should buy your product in the first place.
My sense is that the 200-600 PDA market is in fact doomed, because the marginal value of the PDA once you are carrying a laptop and featureful phone is small. However it doesn't mean there is zero value in the PDA. It follows that PDA prices have to drop. If I were to imagine the successful PDA device of 2010, it'd cost about $100 in todays terms, and by design would complement your phone and laptop, having easy to use wireless connectivity to them. Connectivity exists today, but it is extremely awkward. Microsoft's bluetooth is positively dreadful from a user's perspective. The question is whether PDA prices will reach that point before the buyers have completely abandoned the form factor.
There are two additional survival scenarios to consider. The first would be specialized devices, such as a GPS/PDA or perhaps some follow on to the video iPod. These are cases where usage makes a phone form factor less attractive. The second possibility is that a truly superior PDA may appear and revitalize the market, although this is a long shot. What I think we've learned by watching the music player market is that design and connectivity matter. Sure lots of people bought MP3 players before the iPod, but the iPod actually drove the expansion of the market, rather than cannibalizing it. It's not impossible to imagine a video iPod/PDA becoming a must-have item.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Amazing, I've just been through the same kind of epiphany. I've got my iBook and Treo with me constantly, but a couple of weeks ago found myself floundering with my todo's and whatnot. While syncing is no problem, I really didn't feel I had a Birds Eye View. Since I'm a project manager basically hired out to customers, I have an extremely heterogenous workload. Like many, I went the GTD -> 43Folders (link in parent post) -> Hipster PDA (3x5 index cards).
I liked the templates I found referenced at 43Folders, especially those at DIYPlanner http://www.diyplanner.com/. BUT, I've whittled it down to a week template, and a blank template that covers everything else.
The result? Pure goodness! An empty inbox, a few contexts, preemptive rather than reactive management. And all in two weeks. For the first time in a long time I'm facing a weekend without catchup work.
I love my Treo, but it has been completely displaced by pen and paper + Mail.app + iCal.
Simplicity rules.
But when devices converge, and you get one thing that is a cell phone, and a camera, and an MP3 player, and a GPS/mapping/directions device, and it manages and hotsyncs your email and address book and lets you edit them, then how can you really say which category of device "won" and which ones "died?" Is it based on the existence of a pen for input that truly defines the PDA? Is it based on whether you end up buying the device at an office supply store or a cell-phone store? Is it based on which predecessor device the new device looks the most like?
I don't think PDA functionality is going away, it's either being subsumed or else subsuming the functions of other devices. I think that when functionality is integrated, arguing over which previously separate set of functionality "won" and which "died" is just pointless semantic quibbling.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?