I’ve seen many articles of late talking about how how PDA sales are dropping world wide, I’ve also seen articles talking about how high end phone sales are climbing at a dramatic rate. This really should be obvious to the big manufactures, but apparently it isn’t. The reason is simple, people do not want to walk around with a PDA strapped to one hip, and a Phone attached to the other, it’s simply not logical to expect people to do that. After years of missing the point, first PalmOne with their Treo PDA/phone systems, then came the O2 with XDA models but until very recently, none of the really big guys have realised that the market for PDA’s has actually increased, it is only the market for PDA’s without phone functionality that is dropping. So now we have HP finally coming to their senses and releasing iPaq PDA’s with phone functionality, before long I expect it will be a standard feature for all iPaq’s. Expect the rest of the big manufacturers to follow suite once this takes off.
Given the choice of PDA to have phone functionality added, I’d definitely go for the Sharp SL-6000L Linux PDA, because it is so far the most powerful impressive unit I’ve seen. I suspect that more work has to be done to make walking around talking into your PDA look less geeky. A friend of mine is the proud owner of an O2 XDA and he looks like he is talking into a flat silver brick. Expect to see some innovative new designs as manufacturers work on new ways to shrink the PDA’s without reducing the screen size and keyboard usability. My next phone will be one of these babies, probably from Panasonic, Motorola or NEC (or any of the other manufacturers that are using Linux on their phones.) It’s an exciting time to be a geek.
