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.'"

Comments

The Original UMPC

[BWJones]

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.

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 .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.

Re:The Original UMPC

[TommyBlack]

It seems like there are a lot of things that PDA's should do but they don't. I have a Palm Tungsten E, and I keep thinking it should be more useful. For instance, the other day I needed some information I had on my USB flash drive, but I had nothing handy it could interface with; shouldn't this be the job of my PDA? Doesn't anyone who designs these things have this kind of inspiration?

Re:The Original UMPC

[drinkypoo]

I am of the opinion that USB flash drives are lame. Mind you, I have one on my keychain, and I use it, but that's only because I got it for free. The only kind that makes sense is the kind that's got a SD card (or similar) in it, and it's really just a tiny card reader. This was a lot less true when we didn't have access to $5 card readers, though. I got a several-in-one card reader (it says 7 in 1 or something, but it has four slots, they must be counting SD and MMC separately or something, which makes little sense) for free with my digital camera (from geeks.com) and you can buy them retail for under $20. You can order 'em off the 'net for practically nothing any day of the week. Also, many laptops now come with a memory card slot; usually this is SD/MMC, unless it's a sony.

It doesn't make much sense to me to have storage tied to a particular interface. At the same time, it is absolutely retarded that PDAs are commonly USB clients, but not USB hosts. There are existing silicon solutions that let a device be both, and if a PDA is supposed to be a computer, it should be a USB host. My PDA, which was $200 as a refurb, is a 400MHz ARM (xscale) with 64MB RAM. That's more powerful than the first three computers I had with USB (though not all of them put together.)

Simplicity, price, and size please

[Com2Kid]

How about something that has the functionality of the older palms:

• basic handwriting reco through graffiti or the like
• Keeps track of names, phone numbers, basic notes, a todo list
• Simple interface

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.

Maybe a future, but more as a small UMPC

[kbob88]

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).

PDA?

[Ivan Pistoff]

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....

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Defining Your Terms

[Just Some Guy]

Some people won't work on anything smaller than 10", some people will watch TV on a video iPod and call it good because it fits in their pocket. I think this is less a problem with technology that a hurdle created by personal preference.

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.

If it doesn't fit in my pocket ...

[jc42]

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.