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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.'"
I wrote a couple of articles about where I thought the PDA might be going back in 2002 and 2005. Specifically, I'd suppose (hope) that it might see a resurgence through the iPod phenomenon.
.Mac subscription/connectivity to enable syncing with your desktop/laptop and provide a cell phone service implemented like iChat, I suspect it could be highly profitable.
We really have not seen a whole lot of innovation in the PDA market aside from color screens and somewhat faster CPUs since Palm and then Microsoft entered the market. The first device that truly works as an assistant that is affordable will, like Palm did in the 90's take over the market again. Phone use will be required, but could easily function with a Bluetooth earpiece. It will have to have a big enough screen in portrait or landscape mode to surf the web (surfing the web on my Tungsten T3 sucks), will have to be able to plug into a projector and deliver Keynote (or Powerpoint) presentations, read and annotate pdf's, have an honest 4-5hr battery life (ideally more, but this will depend upon new battery technology or fuel cells), be rugged, have a decent way to enter information through a keyboard (real or virtual) and be reasonably affordable.
The Newton was the original UMPC and did many things very well (including handwriting recognition in the 110 and up), but were waaaay too expensive for their time. I had a 110 and a 120 that I used for years before they simply could not keep up, but that form factor is still ideal. Put a color screen in it, run OS X on a flash drive along with global band cell phone connectivity, 802.11 and Bluetooth and if you can sell it for $700-800 or so, you have the ideal PDA. That may be cutting the margins thin, but if Apple could sell it along with
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The current crop of PocketPCs stink. I'm anxious to upgrade, but here is what I am finding:
:(
- NONE offer PCMCIA support (rendering my 5GB HDD useless)
- If you want 128MB or more of RAM, the highest resolution you will get is quarter-VGA (320x240)
- If you want VGA (640x480) resolution, the most RAM you'll get is 64MB
- Lack of accessories (e.g., high capacity batteries)
Thanks to Carly Fiorina canning the iPaq line (she basically brought back the inferior Journada line) expansion capability of the PocketPC is nil, and the quality has only gone downhill. I'm glad she got fired but she managed to kill the PocketPC platform just as it was gaining steam. I still use my 3670 but I need more RAM, higher resolution, a faster CPU, and expansion capability.
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I think there is a market for PDAs, but not as they are currently configured.
Most of the current uses of a PDA will probably be ceded to smartphones (calendar, address book, tasklist, calculator, MP3 player, etc).
The one advantage that a PDA could have is that its form factor has traditionally been small enough to be truly portable and almost large enough that tasks that are next to impossible on phones' small screens (e.g., surfing the Web, using interactive applications) can actually be performed on them without too much user frustration.
Who really likes using the Internet on a phone? Does anyone think that tablet PCs are really that portable (without a laptop bag)?
Therefore I think there would be a market for PDAs with good sized screens and Wifi/cellular data connections. People would use them as an appliance to surf the Internet and for other applications that required more screen real estate than a phone has. The real killer machine would be about the size of a checkbook (so it fits in your pocket) and flips open to reveal two screens that fit up against each other almost seamlessly, thus doubling screen size.
I think UMPCs are too big, and smartphones too small to be truly portable yet usable Internet appliances. PDAs could fit that niche (thus blurring the distinction between them and UMPCs).
Compare the installed base of PDAs (either by model, by manufacturer, or by the class of devices as a whole) to the installed base of portable gaming devices (GameBoy, et. al.), and you might see *one* possible direction for the PDA. Previously, games were popular on a PDA, but the limitations (speed, memory, battery life, etc.) made it evident that portable gaming on a PDA wasn't enough to keep the PDA craze alive as we knew it. The Nintendo DS, though, is already starting to look more and more like a PDA every day: there's a homebrew organizer (http://www.youngmx.com/?loc=ndsdev/DSOrganize), a Linux project (http://dslinux.org/), and even a game that features puzzles aimed at/successful with older people (http://www.nintendo.com/gamemini?gameid=tYVqJgro- KG6QL_mMbXFoQTkQIzgi9nU). The fact that it has touch/stylus input and 802.11b is enough to get one's mental gears turning at the possible confluence of a gaming idiom and personal information management idiom in a single device.
Perhaps the change will come from the other direction. As millions and millions more Nintendo DS units (and Sony PSP units, for that matter) are sold, we may get a population of generally older, more sophisticated portable gamers who demand a bit more functionality from their handheld devices -- the very same functionality that a stripped-down, basic PDA would have provided. Instead of a feature-rich-but-mostly-underused PDA that can play games, we might have a gaming-device-that-also-holds-my-calendar that can read e-mails. And I guarantee you that there are more GameBoys out there than Palms.
iPAQ hw6515 is a step in the right direction: it is a PDA with an ability to make phone calls. It has PocketPC OS with its advantages and disadvantages. You can make phone calls, surf the web, listen to MP3s, send e-mails, take photos and find out where you are - yes, it has a GPS module, too. The "qwerty" keyboard is quite handy and beats T9 systems without a doubt. The software has few quirks and takes few days to learn. Setting up secure email submission is difficult if not outright impossible but I guess this was never MS priority.
Doesn't PDA stand for Portable Digital Assistant? If you're cell phone is digital and it assists you in some way isn't it then a PDA? Same with laptops and media players. How can they "compete" with PDA's when them themselves are PDA's? Stupid....
that's why I bought mine, but I evolved and now use it as much as a PDA as a GPS. I hope this article is wrong, but I fear that the ubiquity of the cellphone and the well recognized need for integration of portable devices will push the format more towards a phone form and less toward a PDA. This is a shame as the PDA is in my opinion a far better interface and could easily accommodate gps, bluetooth phone, media player, and simple camera functions.
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I don't disagree with anything you say, but I do want to say that basically all cellphones made today have more processing power than an original palm pilot, which had a 16MHz Dragonball CPU, from the days when the dragonball was based on the 68000. My Motorola V300, which is a well-outdated phone, was middle of the road when I Got it and has a 206 MHz 32 bit RISC processor and an ATI graphics coprocessor which handles the camera and which does 2d graphics acceleration. Even my crappy little suppository-sized Siemens phone before that had Java, though it was much more limited - still, it implies a certain amount of processor power, probably at least 40MHz and probably 32 bit. Probably almost no cellphones have floating point, but since there's integer implementations of just about every codec we care about (including mp3, ogg, mpeg4 in particular DivX, and so on) that's not much of a show-stopper. With the right software (that from the V500, which is precisely the same phone but with bluetooth and different software) the V300 can even shoot video at some minuscule resolution and encode it using mpeg4. My phone has 5MB flash available, where my upgraded palm pro had only 2MB. My phone has only about 262x144 resolution (Forget the precise, but those numbers sound kind of right) but it's something between 12 and 16 bit color, transflective, and I can play video on it. I remember playing the craptacular monochrome video clips on palm that were functional only as a demo of what the hardware could[n't] do...
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Know what I want? Components! Make a variety of displays that are basically thin clients (via X11-over-Bluetooth? RDP? Whatever, just as long as it's the standard). Make a variety of processing units. Make a variety of input devices. Make a variety of speaker/headphone/microphone units. Most importantly, make multiple brands work together seamlessly. Convergence? I want divergence by piecing together the set of interoperable parts that fit the way I want to use them!
In my dream setup, I sit down at a public access point and get my 8" screen and compact keyboard out of my bag. That's it. I'm set up and ready to use it. They both talk wirelessly to the real processor which is squirreled away in my messenger bag and only sees the light of day when I need to recharge it. If a cell or VOIP call comes in, it's automatically transferred to my wireless earpiece.
Us geeks will always have the iPod-sized processing equivalent of an overclocked Celeron, but Joe Businessman can buy a quad-Xeon unit and car battery on wheels to power it. Maybe I'm just going to the grocery store, so I'd only take the 3" touchscreen (so I can mark off my shopping list as I go). Have to give a presentation? Bind to the projector client in the conference room until it's over.
I truly think this is the future. I want a cheap Dell processing box that never leaves my shirt pocket, or beltclip, or whatever. I want a nice Samsung client to display it's output. I want a Happy Hacking portable keyboard for input. See, ever since Palm discontinued the IIIxe, their hasn't been a single model of PDA from any manufacturer that covers all the features I want. Dell might not make as much per individual item by selling the components separately, but I truly believe that they'd make a killing by hawking vast numbers of the smaller pieces. No PC maker that I know of sells monolithic PC-screen-keyboard-mouse desktop units, but that's exactly how they expect you to buy your portable electronics.
Wake up, Apple and Dell! There's a whole untapped market of people who'd love to customize their PDAs, particularly those people who have never used one (start off with a cheap CPU and upgrade it later if you like it). And the thing is that all of the hardware, software, wireless tech, and protocols are in common use that could make this happen today.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
One of the issues with being a USB host is that PDAs generally don't have the battery capacity to supply USB power. The Nokia 770 (great device BTW), for example, can act as a USB host but will only work with powered peripherals (which excludes thumb drives) unless you use a powered hub in the middle.
Obviously having to lug around a powered hub or search for a wall socket for your peripherals limits the usefulness somewhat. (Although there is a niche of battery-powered USB hubs.)