Inside IT

The PDA is dead, long live the PDA's functions

Are sales of PDAs, or "personal digital assistants", booming or falling? Ask the research companies. Gartner reports that shipments grew by a healthy 18.4% to a record 17.7m units last year, while GfK reckons they plunged by 41%.


Gartner uses a less traditional definition, but in some ways it's more interesting. It reckons that PDAs are data-centric gadgets that you normally use with two hands, and voice is secondary. Smartphones are, conversely, primarily used for voice, and they're usually used with one hand. It's the difference between, say, a RIM BlackBerry (a PDA in a declining market) and a BlackBerry Pearl (a smartphone in a growing market).

Another difference is the way devices are seen and sold. GfK reports that at Christmas, the average price of a PDA (£161) was higher than the network-subsidised average price of a smartphone (£138), from which "the consumer received far more functionality". It also notes that "retailers are taking PDAs out of their stores, meaning they are no longer visible to consumers to generate interest".

Gartner, by contrast, says that "48% of all PDAs shipped in 2006 were purchased by enterprises". They are doing serious work for delivery van drivers, field service engineers etc. So the PDA market may be around for a while, even if it becomes very small.

But it's hard to see sales thriving if buyers have to choose between an expensive PDA and a "free" smartphone. The fact that the smartphone might well cost them £400 without a contract doesn't make it expensive, it just makes it seem a bigger bargain.

There is one consolation for beleaguered PDA enthusiasts: smartphones are basically PDAs in flashier cases. All the main smartphone operating systems started in the PDA market, including Palm, RIM, Symbian (which came out of Psion), and Windows Mobile, which is a version of Windows CE.

There is even some consolation for Microsoft, which has struggled with CE for a decade. Now it is growing fast and has about 56% of the PDA market on Gartner's definition, ahead of RIM (19.8%), Palm (11.7%) and Symbian (5.4%). Of course, success in PDAs is not the same as success in smartphones, but it's better than nothing.

What happens in the future is anybody's guess, but I expect the mobile phone industry will continue to add functions. Often, new features are developed on different devices - Game Boys, Palms, iPaqs, iPods, TomToms or whatever - then imported into mobile phones. What an iPaq could do five years ago, a smartphone can probably do today.

This insatiable appetite for integration is going to make life tougher for the companies that sell standalone devices. It doesn't mean people will stop buying cameras, MP3 players and other gadgets. But it does mean there will be more cases where you don't actually need the higher quality that you can get from a separate device. And as the smartphone's functions get better, other devices will be squeezed.

It's much the same as someone from Microsoft jokily described the effect of the company's software. He told me: "We're not raising the bar, we're raising the floor."


Today's best video


    Emma Watson on feminism

  • John Howard Canberra

    Viral misogyny speech 'nonsense'


    Sir Paul McCartney raps for Meat Free Monday

  • Newcastle train composite

    Rail line to Australian city to be torn up


Today in pictures

More from Inside IT