Ding dong the PDA is dead

Could it be that those tiny handheld computers that people have used to replace their day-timers are dead? It appears as if that may be the case.

At a meeting with palmOne at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas recently, the company had no new hardware to show and the noise they are making now is all about the Treo 600, a smartphone with PDA functions.

The heyday for PDAs has gone. So I figured I’d chat with Hewlett Packard about their iPaq PDA devices, which are outselling palmOne in Europe. But then their executives wanted to catch an early flight. I figure they had nothing pressing to say. Then I went to Toshiba. They wanted to talk more about laptops than handheld computers. It was a great big snore.

Through all this my palmOne Tungsten T3 PDA bleated and vibrated plaintively from my pocket about meetings that were scheduled. Then its battery died and it shut up. It was prophetic.

When I got home, I noticed that palmOne was laying off 12 per cent of its staff and shifting production toward smartphones. It’s a good thing they bought Handspring last year. It’s a PDA maker turned smartphone maker. So if the PDA is dead and no one wants one, what are we going to do? Prop open your window with your Tungstens, iPaqs and Zires and head for the cellular phone outlet to get a smartphone. That’s the current term for a wireless data-enabled cell-phone blended with a mobile computer that has MP3, PDA and voice recording capabilities.

But the term smartphone is so 2003. It implies the device is a phone first, a good phone perhaps, but still, only a phone. The future from what I saw at the show is about modular computing. That’s the term that Michelle Warren, an IT industry analyst at Toronto-based Evans Research Corp., uses. She pointed to companies like OQO that are developing mobile devices that offer “portability and functionality of a notebook and PDA, but in one device.” OQO (pronounced OAK-yo!) is a startup down in Silicon Valley that has built a Walkman-sized computer that features an LCD screen and thumb-pad keyboard, as well as a USB port and other computer connectors and it runs Windows XP. Is it a PDA or a mobile computer? And will it be a smart phone, too? The lines are blurring. It does have a 1 GHz Transmeta Crusoe processor and 256 MB of RAM. The problem is battery power. Instead of several days of juice, its battery lasts two to six hours.

But if you want a PDA but not a phone, then maybe a wireless wristwatch will do. At the show, Microsoft announced the U.S. launch of its SPOT watches. Available from companies like Fossil and Suunto, they are Microsoft-powered wristwatches that receive news bulletins, Outlook calendar updates and IM messages from an FM radio signal (in 100 cities across Canada and the U.S.). I had one in California and they are pretty darn fun, except for a US$59 a year network access fee. As I write this, Canadian access is coming (perhaps as early as summer).

But getting back to Warren’s modular computer idea, the future of PDAs is really a set of devices that you wear that can all talk to each other and behave like a smartphone and a smartwatch and an OQO pocket computer.

Add to that a set of sunglasses with a little monitor floating in the field of view and you’ve got yourself the progeny of the PDA. Don’t snort in disbelief, a company called Ingineo showed off such a device – called the Eyetop Centra – at the show. It is designed for laptops and mobile DVD players for now, but ideal for tomorrow’s next generation modular computer.

Yeah, ding dong, the PDA is dead, long live modular computing.