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The Future of the PDA
An anonymous reader writes "XYZComputing is taking a look at the future of the PDA and what obstacles might stand in the way of continued popularity. From the article: 'While is hard not to appreciate the PDA's ability to change with the times, it appears that its heady days of mobile dominance are coming to an abrupt end. A number of factors are competing in the mobile products field right now, all of which are vying for the same buyers. The most formidable competition to the PDA is the smartphone, but there is also pressure from small laptops, the upcoming UMPC, increasingly capable cell phones, and a few other takers, like portable media players.'"
It doesn't even need a color screen, though grayscale would be nice just for legibility reasons.
A 20mhz or so CPU should suffice, if even that much is needed. It would be cool if it could fit in the credit card holder of my wallet (most wallets suck as it is, when you are limited to the subset of wallets that can carry a PDA, it becomes really hard to find a non-cruddy one), and has a week long battery life or some such. Oh yes, and STATIC MEMORY. Honestly, only 4 or so megs are needed.
Price? No more than $50.
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I rely on my Palm for all sorts of things. Primarily just keeping organized, GPS, and a book reader. When i (thought) I had lost my old one a few months back I went out to get another. No retailers carry the things in quantity anymore, and they are hard as all hell to find where they are displayed. One place I went actually had them in a cage underneath a counter, no display or anything. While a smartphone is fine for most, i believe in the general thought that if you take 2 things and combine them, you wind up with 2 inferior things in one. A bulky, annoying phone, and a small-screened pda.
Any information may be true or incorrect depending on your perception of said information
A pda is supposed to be a personal digital assisstant. Modern pdas have become pcs, personal computers. They are laptops in a small form factor. If you compare a modern pda to an older laptop you will find many resemblences: their processor speed, their screen size, and the applications. I don't need word for my pda. I don't need games for my pda, though they are nice. If pda manufacturers are going to keep making pdas like pcs they should go all in and include decent hard drive size, so you can store and play music, native usb support, ie a female usb plug, and they should include more computer like software. However they still keep the base functionality of the pda with note takers, address books, and the like. But instead of making a pda with just the basic functionality of a pda, they include computer like apps. They take a middle stand making pdas too expensive for most users, and include apps that most users don't need or won't use. I think that pdas should either be more like a cell phone, simple interface, limited apps, or like a tablet pc: great variety of apps and a decent interface for using those apps.
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I had a Newton long ago. It was a very nice device. It was big and heavy because it was ahead of it's time, but the interface was quite nice. If Apple were to release a new Newton (or whatever they decide to call it) that was nothing more than iCan and Address Book I would be happy. VERY happy. They could add more and make it a full-fledged PDA (SafariMini, iMail2Go, whatever) I would only be happier. Someone with a decent UI touch is badly needed. I've heard rumors that the touch-screen iPod will do this (we'll see if that even exists) and if it does I will gladly upgrade.
Or imagine how long it could last without a charge if it used ePaper? They could make it the size of a PC Card (like the old Rex PDAs) with a touch screen. Considering all the high-rez high-color screens we see out there (in phones, other PDAs, digital cameras, PSPs and DSes, etc.) they could put a great screen in there and have good battery life if they didn't go the ePaper route.
PDAs are OK, but they have enough problems that I can see why more people wouldn't want them (especially if your phone is half-decent and can sync with your computer, stupid Sprint crippleware LG PM-325).
Give me an OLD Newton. Same as it was. Just shrink it (as would be trivial with today's technology) and make it sync with iCal and AddressBook and I'd be happy.
Please Apple, give us a good PDA. You did it for computers, you did it for digital music players, do it for PDAs.
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My old PalmPilot ran for 35 hours on two AAA batteries. It's considered about average for a small laptop to get one-tenth that much before you start strapping giant heavy batteries on all sides of it.
Anyone who takes planes frequently (i.e. salespeople who tend to own PDAs) might actually benefit from a device with more than 5 hours of battery life.
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Look at the palm 700w. It does everything a dell axim does ... has the stupid SDIO slot, and stylus ... you can add sd mem cards or GPS or whatever you want .. plus windows mobile PDA apps. Its the same damn thing as any other PDA but also functions as a phone. Actually, its nicer cause its got a clean little qwerty keyboard right on the front for 1 handed use. I'd never use a plain PDA, but i'm pretty stoked on my 700w.
The future of the PDA isn't dire -- it just needs to find its niche. Like everything else, portable computing will eventually modularize (when consumers have their way, at least), and the day we see the emergence of a half decent wearable display, and hopefully some versitile input mechanisms, the PDA will lose its jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none chains and morph into a powerhouse of a mini-cpu, storage and personal area networking hub.
There's a lot of different device categories out there, but only so much space in peoples' pockets or in their minds. Two interactive devices, perhaps three if one is special purpose, is probably the limit.
On the high end, small and light notebooks are good enough today that they work as real computers - I have a Panasonic R3, and it's my only computer. I meant to get a real desktop as a complement, but I just never got arond to it. Whenever I have my bag with me (and I usually have), it comes along. And it is a far better platform for "computing" than any PDA out there. If I were to get a PDA again, it would have to be something that complements this one on the low end.
On the other end, my current, normal (not a smartphone) phone is capable of most incidental things I need. Calling (not that I actually speak that often), email, music player, small text reader (directions, schedule and the like), alarm clock, dictionary - web surfing too, though I don't use it much. It's certainly not perfect - the screen resolution does equal that of my old PalmIII, and is in color and much easier to read, but is of course smaller - but it is always with me and it is _good_enough_.
A PDA would have to displace either my phone or my computer for me to consider one again. And to do that it would have to do what the lost gadget did at least reasonably well, and give me something extra - some compelling functionality that would make it interesting to switch in the first place. I am not aware of any such functionality today.
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My biggest beaf with smartphone/PDA's is that (in the US) they are exclusive to the cell phone company for the most part. They have a vested interest in NOT supporting WiFi, and DEFINATELY not VoIP via WiFi. Some companies (Verizon) also make it nearly impossible to install non-verizon applications on it, or deliberately cripple a device that was originally capable of doing much more.
You end up with abortions like the Treo which is a really crappy phone and a pretty crappy PDA. Hell, you can't even get a decent simple phone with bluetooth without also getting the crappy MP3 player and crappy camera (and crippled bluetooth as well.) Furthermore, if you want to send an email they seem to want to tack on another $50 / month on top of a $60 voice plan. Considering DSL can now be had for $20/month, that's insane. Ya, it's wireless, but still...
Now that's not to say that someone couldn't do one of these combo units RIGHT, but given history it is extremely unlikely that we will see it done well in the near future. The cell phone companies just don't get it.
So anyway, I'm still waiting for something like a modern Zaurus which Sharp seems to have discontinued in the US for the most part. Nobody else seems to have anything close. Considering I can get a 1G SD card for $80 retail, these little 64M PDA's are just toys. Give me some ROOM man! Give my the ability to REALLY sync my mailbox which is running about 360M now... Frankly, I don't Need it to be a cellphone - not that I really want to put a brick up to my ear anyway, but I'd use it with a bluetooth headset. And VoIP over WiFi is mandetory.
I remember reading that back when the first Palm Pilot was being developed, there was a mantra among the developers to the effect that "If it doesn't fit in my pocket, it won't be in my pocket."
;-)
This is why I'd predict that the "smartphone" will win over the "PDA". The gadgets that are being marketed as PDAs now mostly are physically too large for the typical shirt pocket.
My wife even has a Treo, but she mostly leaves it home on the desk, because it's "too big", and carries a tiny cell phone that's just a phone. The Treo doesn't get used much, except for the few games she has loaded. (She loves the Sudoku puzzles.
For several years, I had a Kyocera smartphone, which I used a lot as both phone and PDA. At least I did, until it lost its calendar, and when I tried to reload from backup, it "backed up" its (empty) calendar, wiping out the backup. So I went back to a paper pocket calendar, which is more powerful anyway.
When it started dying, due to a company subsidy I got a CrackBerry. It also fits in my pocket, and is a fairly good phone, but otherwise not too useful. Now that I don't work there any more, and pay for it myself, I find that it's not worth the money. If you're not on an Outlook email system, its email is fairly cruddy and difficult to use. Its browsers are all cruddy, not much better than the initial Mosaic release. And our attempts to use it as a modem all came to naught. (Yeah, the salesmen said it would work, but after the company signed the deal and gave us developers the BBs, we found that RIM's CS people couldn't be bothered to answer our question.) So much for the idea that it would get our laptops connected where there was no wifi.
Frankly, the things are mostly a waste of money, unless you have one with software tailored for the one job you need it for.
I keep hoping the handhelds.org people will come up with a way to do a pocket-size gadget that does GSM/GPRS/wifi and can also talk IP across a USB and/or Bluetooth link. With linux on board, including ssh, I could program the rest of the stuff myself, and we won't have to deal with the obtruction from the phone companies who insist on locking us out of the most useful stuff.
Yeah, I know; I'm dreaming. There's no way the US phone companies will allow a pipsqueak like me to use "their" infrastructure for my own development purposes.
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Does wanting a bigger screen than any current cell phone make me a fanboy?
If you want to use PCMCIA devices, you don't want a PDA, you want a small laptop.
There's no way you're getting a tiny handheld with a big PCMCIA slot in it.
Who cares? I've lot way too much data to trust the RAM for storage. Plug-in a CF or SD card for all the storage you could want. (I'm still pissed SD is getting more popular, when CF is more than small enough, and 50% less expensive)
There's nothing she could have done to change the buggy, unstable, inflexible, data-corrupting nature of WinCE, which has always been it's downfall.
Personally, I gave-up on PDAs, iPaqs, etc. The ultra-lightweight notebooks from Toshiba and others have far faster CPUs, better screens, far more storage, flexibility, etc., and some have extremely long battery life, too. The PocketPC idea tried to do everything, while doing nothing well. Palm had a good niche, but they got too ambitious, and went the same way.
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generic-man wrote:
That is one of the problems with the newer PDAs: shorter battery life, combined with non-replaceable batteries. I used to use two sets of rechargable batteries with my Handspring Visor and as long as I changed the batteries every other day I always had plenty of battery power. If my batteries happen to run short, I can easily pick up a replacement set anywhere.
One of the reasons for the shorter battery life on new PDAs is the need for a backlight to view the screens. The old monochrome screens might not have been as nice as the color ones, but I could view them in normal light without the need to turn on the backlight. I now have a Palm T/X and while the screen is great looking, you must use the backlight to view it.
I wish Palm would come out with a monochrome successor to the old Palm Vx (one of the best PDAs they ever came out with) but with a higher resolution screen. The m515 was a good successor but the battery life suffered due to the color screen and its need for a back light.
It is also nice to be able to slip it into your pocket versus a brief case. Plus, I read many e-books and a long battery life is definitely a plus.