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Filed under: Computer Science — Daniel Lemire @ 13:06

Interesting post on Slashdot today: Are PDAs Simply Finished?? It appears that many vendors, including Sony, are moving out of the North American PDA market.

Those of you who know me since… since a year before I joined Acadia as a professor, will know that I love my PalmOS PDAs. I’ve owned many over the years, and my Palm m500 will hopefully be with me for many years to come.

To be fair, I did notice that most people don’t use PDAs. At NRC, every researcher could get a powerful iPAQ. The only person who used it a lot that I know is Scott Flinn. And Scott wasn’t exactly pleased (high failure rate, battery problems and so on) .

The North American market is kind of special: everyone (but me) drives to work. At work, you are sitting in front of your computer, so why use a PDA? When in transit, you have your cell phone anyhow, so why not build the PDA into the cell phone… Also, laptops are shrinking, so why not carry that instead?

I realized there was a problem when I bought my m500 two years ago. I think things are probably worse now. The m500 is a basic model. It does not play MP3s, it doesn’t run games (except my very own Sokoban implementation). The salesman didn’t want to sell a m500. What? No color? No MP3s? I insisted. Why? I needed 3 weeks of battery life and something inexpensive so I can break it and not cry… that’s right, you read me right. I don’t want to work for my PDA, have to think about my PDA. The PDA works for me. I drop it on the table for two weeks if I want and there it stays. I also do not want anything but project related stuff on my PDA. It is a work tool, not a game, not a social gadget. So I had to have my m500 special ordered and it took 5 weeks or so. When I got it, the salesman had a smirk, he was thinking “what an old geek”.

PDAs are right for me. I don’t want a cell phone. I owned one at NRC but it remained on my desk. I don’t want a very small laptop: it has to be no bigger than my wallet and a laptop of that size would be useless. It has to be a very long battery life because I’m not good at charging devices every day. I want the thing to remain in my pocket, not on some desktop.

The PDA must allow me to take notes at meeting, fill in addresses, enter meeting dates, and have some form of project management software. That’s all. My m500 is more than capable to serve all these tasks. A color screen or an integrated cell phone is just candy I don’t need.

So, are PDAs over? I hope not. I think they were always only good for a small fraction of the population. Those open enough to technology to come at a meeting with a PDA, but resisting technology enough to refuse wearing a cell phone. I think the PDA companies probably cornered their own product. By making them more and more powerful, they made them less useful to people who only want to take notes and jot down meetings.

I predict that PDAs will still be around for a long time, but they won’t sell in great numbers in North America. I already had to special order mine 2 years ago, I expect that it will become quite a niche in 2 years: you’ll have to special order yours directly from Europe or Japan. That’s ok.