Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal has an article about the putative rebirth of the PDA, now seemingly renamed the ‘Hand-Held’. The piece states that sales of these types of devices have stalled and that manufacturers such as palmOne, Archos and Sharp are searching for ways to broaden their appeal. They seem to have settled on a 2-pronged approach : emphasize fun and de-emphasize productivity. 
Greatly improved storage capacity in the models from these manufacturers provides for more audio and video capacity and thus drives the ‘fun’ part . The Archos PMA 430 for example has a 30 GB hard drive, enough to record and play 120 hours of TV and 6,500 songs … whereas stuff like email, contacts and PIM productivity is barely mentioned on the Archos website. palmOne takes a similar tack by promoting its new LifeDrive Mobile Manager as being suitable for Music, Documents, Photos and Videos. The Hand-Helds Strike Back - by Pui-Wing Tam, Wall Street Journal – Wed May 18, 2005 Although not mentioned in the WSJ article, the Archos AV700 is waiting in the wings with a 7 inch screen and a massive 100GB disk drive. 
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Who knows? Maybe the PDA will make another comeback somtime soon. On second thought…NAAH!
Well, on one level you could say the PDA hasn’t gone away, it’s just been integrated into smartphones now.
Now, instead of just businesspeople having PDA capabilities, everyone has them.