Smartphones Up, PDAs Down -- But Does It Really Matter?

from the a-surprise-for-who? dept

Wed, Feb 2nd 2005 11:38am — Mike Masnick

It's still hard to understand why analyst firms get so worked up about the fact that PDA sales are down. This is especially true coming just a couple days after another research firm announced that smartphone sales are way up. It should be increasingly clear that these two markets are basically the same. We've said it before, of course, but when PCs first started adding modems or network cards, no one wrote reports warning that the sale of PCs was declining in the face of these new "connected PCs" catching on. People just realized that the PCs with a network connection were PCs with more features. The same thing is coming true with smartphones and PDAs. While the two products aren't in exactly the same market, it's becoming clear that the markets are merging, and treating them as unique is somewhat misleading.

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Anonymous Coward, 2 Feb 2005 @ 12:02pm

the problem with pda's....
....is that they're not much cheaper than laptops, especially if you want a colour one with wireless etc. and you need all new software for them and it's one more gadget to carry around.
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- Jared, 2 Feb 2005 @ 1:54pm
  
  Re: the problem with pda's....
  That's true. Price factor comes into play, too.
  
  A scenario would be something like I have a phone, and I want a PDA. Since the technology is around, why don't I just get a smartphone and combine them both into one, and I could be using my existing phone plan. If I bought a PDA, I would have to get another plan entirely if I wanted wireless internet or data capabilities for it. Data plans for phones are mostly cheaper than plans for wireless PDAs.
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C. Enrique Ortiz, 3 Feb 2005 @ 3:54pm

PDAs Remain Niche Market
Your view to this, about PDAs and smartphones being the same thing, except for connectivity, is interesting. It is not that PDAs are not connected while smartphones are, it also has to do how they are connected and combining that with multifunction handsets. For example, many PDAs are WiFi enabled, i.e. are connected, but the numbers show their adoption is slowing. But when combining the same type of device with the cellular connectivity, you are making the same device a better *communicator* - personal information device + personal communicator. That is the difference.
See My new smartphone and Users Don't Really Want Device Convergence - Some Reasons...
ceo
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