Originally published July 2 2005
Columnist announces the death of Personal Digital Assistants
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
While Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) seemed like a good idea at the time, the small contraption designed to have a calendar, calculator and sometimes email, has died painfully at the hands of more advanced ideas such as the Blackberry email device (with PDA-like features) and MP3 players like iPods (which can be converted to have PDA-like features), reports Inquirer columnist Doug Mohney.
The Palm/Trio camp moved into adding connectivity to their devices, creating ugly-looking phones with mini-keyboard while Microsoft pushed their camp into loading castrated Windows applications on devices.
Instead, enterprise users locked onto useful and efficient connectivity while the "rest of us" have swung into the wild and growing world of personal digital media.
At the consumer level, PDA developers haven't been able to keep up with the storage and simplified user interface of the iPod and MP3 players.
I know some of you out there have beat your PDAs into submission to be MP3 players, but until PalmOne came out with the "LifeDrive" 4 GB "mobile manager last month, everyone in PDA land coveted the vast range of hard drive storage that digital music players had at their finger tips.
For the enterprise and specialised applications, the PDA will evolve via marketing into a "compact computing" device, usable in areas where you just don't want the weight of a laptop and where you may want more significant battery life.
Secondly, a lot of PDAesque functions will be shoved into phones, so you won't have to lug around a PDA, and a phone, and an MP3 player.
Not everything will migrate into the phone, however, since you want to keep the phone small enough to fit into your pocket and have enough battery life to make it useful.
Finally, there will be a separate and distinct "all-in-one" device that will be about the form factor of the PDA/iPod that will do some things very well - either PDA or play music - and the rest of the functions adequately, but not great.
Users will have their choice of devices built around a heap (4-16GB) of flash memory and longer battery life or a hard-drive based device with 60-100GB and maybe 10-16 hours of use between wall socket recharges.
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