The PDA is now as dead as a duck

PERSONAL DIGITAL Assistants (PDAs) have run their course and it is all downhill from here on. While you can still find Palms and Trios and HP/Compaq devices floating around, the original concept of a simple gizmo to hold phone numbers, calendar information, random notes, and to (maybe) read e-mail has fallen apart.

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. The upstarts at RIM came up with the Blackberry, a purpose-build system to send and receive e-mail into a PDA-sized device. "Crackberry" is successful because it has seamless links into enterprise e-mail systems, decent filters so you don't have to get Adobe .PDFs dumped into the device, and wireless connectivity that just works.

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. It speaks volumes that people have started loading up their iPods with PDA-like applications and adding on microphones to create digital voice recorders that can store hours of high quality speech as well as lots of smokin' party tunes.

Over the next few years, three "camps" will succeed the PDA and the digital music player world. 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. Hopefully all of them will incorporate a USB 2.0 slot for memory keys/sticks as well as an SD slot. The devices will be able to display color photos, archive e-mail, and basically act as a true "digital wallet" of sorts, holding both personal and work information. µ