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October 5, 2004
The PDA’s Unfulfilled Promise
Ah, the modern inconvenience of the PDA.
On one hand, saving us from tracking a blizzard of sticky notes, on the other, frazzling our fat fingers in attempting to interact with them.
I consider myself among the earliest adopters. Yes, it must have been around time I was loading games from the cassette drive on my Commodore Vic 20 that I was proudly sporting my shiny little calculator watch. That’s not a PDA, you say. While the most data it could store was limited to 8 numeric characters, I think of it as an ancestor to a personal digital assistant as it was the first device that I made a pervasive part of my life to simplify some daily tasks.
The next, some manner of Casio device with 16 KB of memory was marginally more useful, but the fact that it couldn’t easily be synchronized with an external device meant that heartbreak was no more than the life of a watch battery away.
Then there were the Palm years.
After good days followed by bad days using the Palm Graffiti language and falling behind taking notes in meetings, I became frustrated. And it wasn’t until the Palm V series was released that I felt the devices had an appropriate form factor where they could be carried in the shirt of a dress-shirt without causing scoliosis.
While the character recognition on the Toshiba Pocket PC device I’m using now is miles ahead of what I got used to on my Palm Pilot, I’m still falling behind compared to the input performance I would have typing on a laptop keyboard.
I was playing with a Sony Clié the other day that has an onboard keyboard. And while the keyboard on the Clié feels expansive compared to my old wristwatch calculator, I still don’t find it that easy to use.
So, now I’m carrying hardcover notebooks and/or my wireless laptop computer. From what I can see, I’m not the only one who used to carry a PDA who gave it up.
And while some predict that the advent of wi-fi is going to help drive a new round of adoption in the PDA arena, I anticipate it having the opposite effect, at least for those without niche uses. I used to carry a PDA as a desktop substitute because I wasn’t about to carry a desktop with me to meetings. But now that I can carry a laptop around the office or my house and still maintain full network connectivity, I have less and less use for a PDA.
I’m waiting for the right balance of integration that I only see happening in fragments. Here’s my shopping list:
Several GB’s of storage for my music
High-speed wireless access to be able to handle the volume of data coming through my inbox these days
Wireless synchronization with not only a laptop or desktop – but a server I can access from outside the firewall
Higher-resolution displays
A more sophisticated user interface that couples the stylus metaphor with something that can accommodate several fingers simultaneously entering data as one can on a keyboard
Improved digital to analog audio converters – most of the DACs I have heard don’t really support a quality conversion for listening to even medium bit-rate music files
Improved software tools for managing and prioritizing notification of the real-time flow of information available through wireless networks
Better security while participating on public wireless networks, especially to support new functionality such a wireless commerce applications.
Mini versions of USB 2.0 and Firewire ports to access and use plug and play peripherals
Several hours of battery life when using the colour display on a No more than 0.5 inches thick and about 3 oz.
Fortunately, there are some bright examples of devices, like Apples iPod, that are offering some of the things on my list. However, for each one of those there are many more examples of what appears to me to be the same old, same old.
Until manufacturers can address the fundamental usability problems of these devices that have been with us all along, the PDA is going to become more and more of a hardware commodity.
Posted by Derek Leverington at October 5, 2004 1:02 AM