The global handheld market continued to slide in 2004, with shipments slipping to below 10 million for the first time since 1999, according to a new IDC report. Update: The German division of T-Mobile today unveiled the latest addition to its venerable line of Windows Mobile based communicators, the MDA IV, with a swiveling VGA display and a 520 MHz Intel XScale. It offers not only GSM, GPRS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, but also adds support for WCDMA-based 3G. It will also include two integrated cameras, as well as a unique swiveling screen concept. The device can either be used laptop-style with both its screen and integrated thumbboard accessible, or tablet-style with only its screen accessible. My take: This T-Mobile machine unveiled today is very important news in the phone/PDA world. This machine right there — with these crazy specs for a phone — is signaling the end of the PDA market and the beginning of the Microsoft domination in the high-end phone world.
Sure, there have been other Smartphones before, but this model shows a different future: one that can seal the fate of Danger and Palm’s in the longer run. If these Windows phones can come down in price to compete with other high-end phones (in the range of $200-$400), MS would “own” the communication OS world as well, before too long.
Also, HP anounced also today that it’s is joining the PDA/phone hybrid market, also with Windows Mobile, but their initial specs are nowhere as good as T-Mobile’s. In any case, this was a very eventful day for the PDA world and the future of the phone one.
If there was an excellent method for inputting text on those things, and desktop OS’s integrated much more tightly with your handheld (authentication, mobile storage, and all that jazz people talk about), handhelds would be useful as more than just PIM-on-the-run devices, which is what they are to most people.
I imagine cheaper, more flexible satellite internet packages would also make these things more attractive. I’d own something like this if I had a use for it.
I know it’s difficult to differentiate what is and isn’t a PDA, but are there comparable figures for phones that are clearly PDAs (e.g., that run PalmOS or PocketPC)? I’m assuming that the market hasn’t shrunk but they’ve just been replaced by phones. But it would be interseting to know the numbers.
Yup, the big thing that kills the PDAs is the phones. If PDAs were to add cheap phone connectivity by default as one of the features (rather than being a phone in a pda skin), the market would explode. To create a cheap mobile phone today, the electronics cost about $15. All they need to do is simply add the electronics to their existing PDA designs, and include the touchscreen as the dial buttons.
Sure, these will be bigger than phone-only devices, but we are not talking about creating a phone with PDA functionality here, we are talking about creating a PDA that happens to do phone services if needed.
Smartphones will quickly supplant PDA’s. I mean, I’m all for gadgets and stuff, but why have my belt full of crap like Batman when a Treo 650 is the only thing I really need? It makes no sense to carry both a PDA and a phone.
whenever i run errands, shopping, delivering, etc…etc…
i still take a simple #2 pencil and shirt pocket sized pad of paper, its cheaper, easier to use, and never needs batteries lol…
Well, the PDAs are more powerful and more versatile than any smartphone around. Also, the Treo650 costs $650 USD, while a PDA with the same functionality (without the phone part) is $200 (the Tungsten|E for example). PDAs have more expansion slots, might have dual connectivity (BT, WiFi), bigger screens, 3D cards, good sound cards, video/mp3 players etc.
Just last night i installed “BetaPlayer” on my Dell x50v PDA for example. I also downloaded the Matrix trailer and basically, for 200 MBs you can rip any DVD/recorded TV program and watch it while on a plane, or on a train/bus to work. PDAs are more like these “multimedia/internet” devices sold by Archos and others, things that phones don’t do as well, because GPRS costs money or they don’t come with powerful CPUs/gfx cards (and they still cost too much).
In other words, PDAs are cross breeds: information devices first of all, internet, multimedia devices secondly (especially if they could add swivel cameras to use with IM video/audio chats). However, if the electronics were there to include some phone functionality too, I believe that they would be great all-around devices, and I would prefer to have one of these rather than a smartphone. Yes, these would be bigger devices, but they would do so much more… If a consumer doesn’t want that “much more”, I guess he is better off with a $30 LGE phone anyway that only does basic stuff, rather than spending money on smartphones/pdas.
I just hope that Dell realizes that sooner or later and enter such a hybrid market…
Agree. Gnome 2.6 has a cool input method called dasher that looks very promising for pdas. I don’t no why PDA makers don’t put Dasher in their handhelds. You can get it for some pocketpcs at
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/Download.html
If PDAs had a hard drive in the same capacity as an iPod then they would sell better. Yes, add a phone and a 10 GB hard drive and sell it all for $399 and you will have a growing market, not a shrinking one.
Maybe because no one can put their head around Dasher?
just tried for first time. It definitely has a learrning curve.
As I wrote in the AximSite.com forums yesterday, this is impossible. Hard drives are a NO-GO on PDAs, because the battery life would go down to ~1 hour on normal usage (currently it is between 3 and 6 hours, depending on the PDA/battery). These hdd drives are also “huge”, compared to the rest of the size of the PDA and the rest of the features it needs to pack in there.
Besides, PDAs like the x50v can support up to 10 GB of data with the use of an 8 GB Compact Flash Type II, and an SD 2 GB, both available today in the market. I believe that 10 GBs are more than enough for anyone, and it’s possible today, without eating too much battery for no good reason.
So, I don’t believe that your argument that “not enough space” is valid for the freefall of the PDA market. The real problem is really the phones…
To ellaborate on the hard disk thing:
the iPod and the other hdd-based mp3/mmedia players load the whole track in the memory and play it from there, and they put the hdd back to sleep immediately. That’s how the iPod can do 12-15 hours on battery.
But the PDAs are not the same, because the hdd would be used all the time because it’s a real OS with many different applications/data going up and down in the memory all the time. The hdd would have to be ON most of the time, like with laptops/desktops. And that would kill the battery life in no time.
A friend of my husband’s went to China for a photography session and he used his iPod Photo as his FW storage solution from his digital SLR. The battery was down to 0% after uploading only a few GB of data continously from his FW camera, just a few minutes after he turned ON the iPod.
So, no, real hard drives –no matter how small they are– are a no-go for devices like PDAs who are a cross-breed PCs in reality and need continously to read/write on these drives.
The real problem is really the phones…
The phones – and the fact that most people don’t need much more than what a modern cell phone can provide.
I had one of the first Palms and used it for about two years, until it died in an accident involving a cat water bowl. I switched back to pen & paper, and after the first few weeks haven’t missed handheld functionality ever since.
I think the major problem pda manufacturers have is that a large number of people only need very basic features for their pda. These folks will not be replacing them very often.
In addition, there’s the laptop affect. If your main machine is a laptop. It greatly reduces your need for a pda.
> If your main machine is a laptop.
>It greatly reduces your need for a pda.
Yup, that too. I mean, the last few years more and more people have laptops.
I would like to see something that has qualities of both a PDA, phone, radio along with wifi capibilities. If this was pulled off at a reasonable price it would be the true handheld device. Until then I will be uninterested in buy a cellphone or a PDA.
I’m really surprised the PDA market has lasted/grown as much as it has.
Any serious businessperson who needs PDA functions, has a laptop.
I’m sure we could all come up with ideas on when a PDA beats a laptop? (I can’t think of enough instances to sustain a large market) But I think the reverse is true more often.
As others have pointed out, phones have stepped up and on the PDAs abilities as well.
And with the shrinking price gap between the two products . . .
And of course the “keeping up with the Jone’s” syndrome has worn off of PDAs. I think the PDA market is doomed. Of course, I thought that when it first started – so WTF do I know
Just boight my SX66 last month!
the screens on pda are so small.. so very small.
the calculators from TI are starting to even act like a PDA these days. TI could have a good market for are more PDA + Calculator if they did it.
I figure smartphones will just eventually keep getting stronger and stronger and eventually make the PDA market shrink tiny. blackberry seems to be growing or am i wrong?
basicly id just like a tiny laptop.
maybe some R&D will make new storage devices to cut power
The Sharp Zaurus C3000 has a 4GB internal harddrive:
http://www.dynamism.com/sl-c3000/
But the PDAs are not the same, because the hdd would be used all the time because it’s a real OS with many different applications/data going up and down in the memory all the time. The hdd would have to be ON most of the time, like with laptops/desktops. And that would kill the battery life in no time.
Please don’t just invent stuff. You said it yourself – memory. The OS boots and uncompresses its partitions from the hard drive to a RAM drive. It can accumulate writes and bundle them to the disk, or use flash to store OS-specific data. There is no constant writing going on to the hard drive. Most embedded low-power systems worth their salt work along this paradigm – even those toy PDAs in Toys R Us.
I do not invent stuff Kon. If you spin the hard drive all the time, it would be a disaster for the battery life.
And remember, you would only need such a massive space on a PDA if you store movies, images or music. In the case of movies/images, the drive would have to spin all too often (even with 16 MBs of buffering), disaster for the battery life in other words. Regarding music, if the media player is not “intelligent” enough to place the whole track into memory like iPod does and then have the privilliges to put the drive down to sleep immediately, disaster again.
And if you use the drive as applications space, then depends how many of these apps you use. If you switch apps all the time, load games, gfx, music in chunks etc etc, disaster again. Thing is, 99% of the apps written for PDAs were no written with these constraints in mind, and they don’t have APIs to access the hard drive and put it to sleep.
Bottom line: the combination of the SD/CF slots on the current high end PDAs is a better solution than a mini hard drive. At least for the OSes/software used today.
Yes, thats just it, People get PDAs and Cell phones on completely different upgrade time frames. People are still running their old PDA, thats why the market has died. And a lot of people just want a simple phone. The phone/pda market can only go so far since it’s something a lot of people don’t want.
People still use PDAs, but their phone is something they just toss and get a different one every year or two when they renew their phone plan.
http://www.techdirt.com/news/wireless/
its about 5 stories down.
He makes the point that Smart Phones really are just PDAs with communication capabilties and that the distinction between PDA and smart phone is mainly academic
Yup! That’s why Palm, and now HP are going into the phone market with all this PDA experience they have, it makes sense. PDAs need connectivity. RIM had it right from the beginning, all Blackberrys were –in a way– a predessesor of the PDA/phone merging thing.
It’s somewhat ironic to me that I decided to check 0SNews on my PDA this evening and to be reading this story with it!
like the minimac this seems like an ideal opportunity to strike while the iron is hot and expand the halo! son of newton
The mini mac would make for a awful PDA, doesn’t even have a screen.
Apple also has no interest in this market. And they have no reason to have interest. The move into markets where the current products are junk. Apple would have a hard time moving into the pda phone market.
It’s not like moving into the MP3 player market where everything else out there was and still is junk.
i wish it were easier to upgrade the OS on PDAs and Smartphones..
I’ve got an XDA II and had an XDA 1, Sony Clie NR750V, Ipaq 3150 and Palm III before it.
Doing IT support makes a PDA pretty much a necessity. IP addresses, user details, drive mappings, reg codes, assorted passwords ..not to mention ebooks, MP3, internet and email connectivity via GPRS…the list is endless. Having the phone built in just seals the deal. I’d have trouble using the smaller screen of a smartphone, particularly for reading books, so I’m hoping this type of device will be around for a long time yet, and carrying a laptop around all day just isn’t an option.
And to tim (dl.dl.cox.net), upgrading is pretty straight-forward, particularly for the XDA’s. Take a look at:
http://www.xda-developers.com
Just one example of some of the fan sites that spring up for these devices.
Not surprised in the least.
1) Too expensive.
2) Too complex.
3) No bloody effective keyboard.
4) Sync nightmares
In my view computer people or people who have already buy these things – which is the wrong market! The right market is the percentage of people who don’t own a PC – but to do this the whole outlook and use thereof has to be turned on its head. I mean who wants to have Windows on a handheld with a screen that’s the size of your palm?
The closest to my ideal is the Zaurus 5500. It is good on battery, allows me to send and receive mail, I don’t care two hoots about browsing. I have my address book in text format and searched with a simple alias and terminal.
I hate telephones and their cluttered bloody stupidly small controls – but to use as a connection tool via infra-red – that works, its easy…….
So yes I have two items. Both small a Nokia phone and a Zaurus. They do all I need with the minimum of fuss and with speed.
So I say the Zaurus is closest to my ideal – what’s everyone else say?
Before I had a Psion 3a, 5 and 7 – why haven’t I got them today? Crap quality, great keyboards – a bit dated software, but it did work well, and the machines I mentioned had battery live the envy of all the hand-helds, but in typical British fashion – quality control and in the US total lack of marketing know-how. Also VERY expensive, especially the Psion 7, a world-beater if ever there was one…..yeah don’t tell me I could have stuped up for a Netbook Pro and got into Windows again and spent another fortune……..
I’ve worked in IT for 25 years. I have, and use, practically every gadget out there: cell-phone, laptop, webcam, digital cam, etc. I am not a “technophobe.”
I was given a really nice, and expensive, PDA as I gift, I learned to use it, but I never do.
It’s too impractical. About 90% of a PDA does can be done better with other means. I can takes notes much better with pencil and paper. I can look up an address or appointment much easier with a day planner.
With a PDA, I constantly have to worry about battery life. I constantly have to worry about the PDA being lost, or stolen, or broken. And if I lose one of those stylus things, the PDA will be just about worthles. And it’s another thing to have to carry around and care for.
Sure a PDA has cool feature like playing music, or games. But, if I do any of that, I’ll burn up the batteries and the PDA will be worthless for anything else.
This whole scene was predicted around 2000-2001 in EE Times:
The future of:
The portable game system (gameboy, zodiac, PSP, GP-32)
The cellphone
The GPS tracker
The Laptop (applications)
The PDA (almost aiming for the same market as laptop)
The MP3 Player
The Portable Video Player
The Digital Voice Recorder
The Digital Camera
The Digital Camcorder
The portable Instant Messenger
Will become one device.
Every year ASICs used to develop these devices get faster and larger allowing more and more functionality for smaller size / battery consumption.
For all those interested, a hard drive does not belong in any portable device where battery life is a factor. Solid state memory has, and always will be the way to go for battery operated equipment. Every degree of heat produced is wasted battery energy.
It is going to take a standard like WiMAX to bridge 75% of the devices I mentioned above. ONE STANDARD for wireless communications means:
One antenna
One radio circuit
One encoding / compression scheme
One power supply
Having mostly the same “glue logic” and radio chipset turns most of the stand alone devices into just FPGA / ASIC firmware.
All the devices I mentioned (for the most part) use an LED backlit LCD screen.
All the devices I mentioned require an OS (larger mp3 players do, to keep track of a database file so that finding songs doesn’t take forever.)
All the devices I mentioned can use large capacity solid state storage like flash memory.
All the devices I mentioned at least require a general processor.
Half the devices I mentioned require a separate and faster graphics processor
All the devices I mentioned require RAM for various functions (anti-skip, smooth playback, fast gaming, fast scrolling of maps, etc.)
A digital camcorder and camera ARE THE SAME THING essentially. The camcorder requires a good amount of buffer, and a fast solid-state storage device.
They all require buttons for user input, the game systems need to be very ergonomic, while the phone systems need a familiar phone pad. The PDA’s either require a pen or a qwerty keyboard (though no one really likes those.)
They all require a battery (probably Li-ion) with a charger.
Every single one of these devices and 90% of their design is in ASICs. This means that multiple devices can easily be combined.
The problem is that people who only need a phone, or only need a PDA or a GPS, to whom all the rest is just fluff and “nice to have, but never use” will NOT PAY for the other features.
Few people will spend $750 – $1,000 on a cell phone replacement or a gameboy, or an MP3 player.
The combination devices that currently exist do not do very well because the companies tend to be really good at one aspect, like the cellphone and really bad at designing the user interface for the others, like an N-Gage or cellphone MP3 player.
A study needs to be done on the best user interface methods for all of those devices. Once completed, that data needs to find its way into the hands of WILLING AND CAPABLE developers who can create this super portable device.
A product like this would really have to be aimed at NEW CUSTOMERS and teenagers who don’t have all of this digital crap yet.
In order to offset costs, the device should be modular (yes I know that is usually a contradiction, but hear me out,) This way lets say the default plain vanilla device has 3 of the features mentioned above and costs $199. That would sell pretty well. Everything else could be sold as either an FPGA update or a hardware addon card of some sort (like addon for a camera with camcorder function, zoomable lens and flash.)
I think something like that would sell AS LONG AS THE USER INTERFACE WAS THE PRINCIPLE DESIGN, NOT AN AFTERTHOUGHT LIKE IT IS WITH ALMOST EVERYTHING ELSE.
Interfaces OF ANY KIND, FOR ANY DEVICE should fit the user, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
my $0.02.
(I’m an electrical engineer, if titles mean anything to you)
I’m quite happy with my PDA. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It’s my leisure reading, my handheld gaming system, my personal organizer.
Being able to pick up a book any time I have a few spare minutes is great, there’s some great work being done on console emulation on PDA’s (most especially on the PocketPCs), and I wouldn’t trade my palm for a day planner unless you paid me some SERIOUS cash, and I’m not sure you could convince me to use a day planner for the rest of my life for any amount of money.
I think it’s important to note, though, that I don’t have a cell phone, have never had a cell phone, and have no intention of ever getting a cell phone.
But I think if they added generic IP phone capabilities to PDAs, THAT would be a wonder, and a marvel, and probably something I’d use. Mmmmm…. Skype.
You know, maybe if somebody would make these things a good PHONE, instead of putting every thing else they can into them, they sell a little more.
I can’t say how happy this makes me, for all these years pundits have been saying the PC is dead and all us geeks would have to give them up for constrained devices that aren’t tweakable or upgradeable. Along with the cell phones getting added features I think you’re seeing the effect of smaller laptops on this segment as well. I mean, why pay $600 for a PDA when I can get a $1500 laptop that is only slightly heavier and very small? (Laptops will be upgradeable soon as well.)
I agree with DataPath. I use my PDA for quite a few things. I use it for reading, playing games, surfing the web (though rarely) and checking my email. I also carry around some digital photos of my family.
I also have a cell phone, but I’m one of those people who likes the phone to just be a phone. Personally, I can’t stand playing the games on my phone because of the limited speed (can we say slow?) nor can I stand to use any sort of data entry on my phone as the T9 keypad just really isn’t all it is cracked up to be.
I personally wouldn’t want a converged device for many of the reasons above. Plus, it would make my phone much larger and I personally like its small size.
Brad: “The mini mac would make for a awful PDA, doesn’t even have a screen.”
Well, obviously any potential entrant they’d introduce wouldn’t use the Mac Mini as a platform. Most likely, it’d be a souped-up iPod or a hybrid combination w/ Motorola’s platform. That is, if Apple were going to offer a PDA phone…
I love my Ipaq 4530. Use it for surfing, email, even the spreadsheet for some stuff. However, the last thing I want is a phone with it. When I’m in a movie theatre, etc. its great to just set my Moto 525 to vibrate and put it in my jeans front pocket. I can’t see myself doing this with a Treo, etc.
I’m guessing theres a way to utilise GPRS on the road using bluetooth b/w the devices… but frankly… GPRS is just too damn expensive (up here in the Great White North, eh!)
QUOTE-
The future of:
The portable game system (gameboy, zodiac, PSP, GP-32)
The cellphone
The GPS tracker
The Laptop (applications)
The PDA (almost aiming for the same market as laptop)
The MP3 Player
The Portable Video Player
The Digital Voice Recorder
The Digital Camera
The Digital Camcorder
The portable Instant Messenger
Will become one device.
-End quote
You can do all that with an HTC blue angel
for my tastes: add FM and TV tuners, UMTS and EVDO networking and I am all set