PDA, RIP

economist ^ | Oct 16th 2003

[stainlessbanner]

The next big thing that wasn't---or was it?

IS IT time to declare the demise of the handheld computer, also known as the personal digital assistant (PDA)? A lot of people suddenly think so, for despite high hopes that the devices---made by such firms as Palm, Sony, HP and Dell---would someday become ubiquitous, annual sales have stayed flat at around 11m units worldwide. This compares poorly with PCs, around 130m of which are sold every year, and mobile phones, with sales of around 460m units. ---The PDA market will never be a mass market,--- says Cindy Wolf, an analyst at In-Stat/MDR, a market-research firm. Almost everyone who wants a PDA, she says, now has one.

In contrast, sales of smartphones, high-powered mobile handsets capable of doing most things PDAs can do, are rising fast. Smartphones can be used to store addresses and phone numbers, download small pieces of software (such as games), browse the internet while on the move, store and play music, and jot down brief messages. And, of course, they are also telephones. Why carry both a phone and a PDA around, when you can carry a single hybrid device? Fewer than 4m smartphones were sold during 2002, but nearly 12m will be sold this year, says Neil Strother of In-Stat/MDR. Although final sales figures are not yet available, it seems very likely that sales of smartphones overtook sales of PDAs in the third quarter of this year.

---The PDA is dead,--- says David Levin, the boss of Symbian, the leading maker of smartphone software. Anssi Vanjoki of Nokia, the world's biggest mobile-phone maker, agrees. PDAs without wireless connectivity are doomed, he says. Even as Nokia, Sony Ericsson and other handset makers build PDA-like functions into their smartphones, some PDA makers are adding phone capability to their handhelds.The two camps have arrived at the same result---a hybrid PDA-phone---from opposite directions.

David Nagel of PalmSource, the firm that licenses the Palm operating system to makers of phones and PDAs, dismisses the idea that one camp or the other has won. To say that there is a single ---killer device--- is, he says, an oversimplification, for there is room for a whole range of PDA-like devices in the marketplace---of which smartphones, in his view, are just one kind. PalmSource is, he says, well placed to compete with Symbian and Microsoft to provide the software to power pocket-sized devices.

This much is clear: handheld computers must be phones too, if they are to sell in any quantity. PDAs of the traditional type, which do not double as phones, are condemned to remain a tiny niche. But whether the sudden rise of the smartphone constitutes the death of the PDA, or its triumph by other means, is a matter of opinion. In other words, the PDA is dead---long live the PDA.

[resistance]

I thought the same thing until my daytimer was stolen and with it a great deal of information such as private phone numbers that can't be replaced. I am now a PDA user with day sync so I have two copies of everything.

I am looking forward to carrying a PDA/phone instead of a PDA and a phone.

[July 4th]

I have had both a Palm and a PocketPC-based PDA, and I am very technologically adept. But I couldn't bring myself to use them on a regular basis. It was just so much easier to put things in a day planner.

The only use I ever had for the PDA, besides a quick way to check e-mail, was to be the one main place where I put phone numbers and addresses. My cell phone stores all of that info now, so it's all I need.