Four or five years ago I could have easily have called this Blog Entry “Palm or Windows Mobile?”, and not cause confusion about whether I was writing about smartphones. The PDA may be past its peak, but it is not dead, as everyone from the Economist (in late 2003) to a CNET editor (in early 2005) predicted. Handheld computers are not thriving though, and it is no longer just smartphones which compete for consumer attention. Retail stores have many models of portable GPS devices on display instead of PDAs. After all, people need to know where they are going and how to get there. Notebooks and high-end media players are also competitors. Interestingly enough, budget notebooks are now priced lower than some of the high end Sony Clies were. A new Dell Axim X51v, released in December 2005, still costs as much as a budget laptop.

PDAs have long offered some GPS capabilities, one of the earliest being the GPS springboard module for the HandSpring Visor Palm handhelds. Now HP offers a Pocket PC which happens to be a GPS, the HP iPAQ rx5915 and a GPS which may not be a Pocket PC, the HP iPAQ 310 GPS.

Yet I still use a handheld with no GPS capabilities, although I also have a Windows Mobile smartphone and an iPod. Somehow I’m still attached to my electronic brain.

Posted on February 27th, 2008 by mervyn