TWILIGHT OF THE PDA

Dick Pountain/16 May 2005/12:36/Idealog 130

The PDA as we've known it since 1996 is entering some sort of terminal crisis. The writing appeared on the wall when Sony pulled its Clie range out of the market, and since then we've learned that PalmSource is bleeding money with PDA shipments down 39% year-on-year. PalmSource has of course also lost the OS royalty revenues from Sony (and the market flop of other Palm OS licencees like Tapwave can't have helped much). The 'traditional' Palm or Pocket PC PDA is being hacked to death from both sides, by smartphones and Blackberry-style email devices from the left and disk-based iPods-on-steroids from the right. According to Gartner, reported in this magazine's news section last month, Blackberry manufacturer RIM is now the leading PDA manufacturer, having increased shipments by 75% in a single quarter to take a 21% market share, ahead of both PalmSource and HP. It's not as if PalmSource hadn't seen this crisis coming, nor that it hasn't tried to do anything about it. The Treo 600 and 650 smartphones were one attempt to head it off, but they took too long to bring to market and they don't appeal to ordinary mobile users, whose minds and fingers have been so warped by the dreadful user interface of the typical mobile phone that they can't now adapt to anything so nearly-rational as PalmOS.

That's a major part of the problem. PDAs have become tarred in popular culture as nerd toys (almost on a par with personal computers) whereas the mobile phone with its ghastly sequential-button-stabbing interface is felt somehow more suitable for normal folks who'd barely learned to program the VHS when DVD came along... PDAs are victims of their own growing power and flexibility - they now do too much, more than most people want, and hence require a degree of learning that most people are not prepared to apply. In another way though PDAs are victims of their weaknesses. A growing percentage of hand-held device buyers want them for wireless email (as witnessed by those RIM figures), but neither Palm OS nor Pocket PC ever made that application straightforward and out-of-the-box enough. In his column this month Mark Needham reports seeing a banner at a recent show that said ‘Why can't a Windows PDA work like a Blackberry?’ and that really says it all. This sort of user buys a Blackberry because it just works.

As PDAs have become faster and more capacious, therefore capable of doing more things, this has worked to their disadvantage rather than advantage. Over the last decade the market grudgingly accepted that personal computers have to be multi-purpose devices, that you have to purchase extra products (ie. application software) to make them do what you want, and that you have to learn a bit about them in order to do so. Every attempt to make the PC into a single-purpose 'appliance' has ultimately failed. But this logic appears not to work in the handheld arena: conditioned by the hugely successful model of the mobile telephone, people expect handhelds to do just one thing well, and don't seen prepared  to put in too much time learning anything else. So you have people who just want a PIM/Address Book/Calendar solution; people who want a phone; people who want push email; people who want to play videogames on the train. This leaves manufacturers with the hellish prospect of designing numerous models fitted to these different niches, a road that Sony had started to go down but lost its stomach for.

The $64m question remains, is it still possible for a PDA manufacturer to hit on exactly the right mix of capabilities and ease-of-use that will find the public's sweet spot and steer this market into a new growth phase instead of the dumpster? All I have to go on is my own experience. My Sony Clie still serves well as address book, memo pad, holder of several language dictionaries and a few ebooks, but over the last six months four more lumpy objects have started cluttering my pockets: a plain-vanilla mobile phone, a small Flash MP3 player, a Minolta digital camera and a USB dongle containing my work-in-progress backup. I'd love a single, well-designed device that was my PIM, phone, music player, usable (3 megapixel) camera and a few spare gigs for data storage (I don't personally need GPS or mobile email, but others would) - and totting up prices of individual items suggests I ought to be prepared to pay £500 for such a gizmo. I'd been wondering whether the Treo 650 would do it for me but fear it may have missed the boat already. Several of my esteemed PC Pro colleagues have already jumped ship to smartphones.

Clearly the technology exists in terms of LCD displays, radio and tiny hard disks - Apple's iPod Photo was a step towards it and PalmSource's not-very-secret LifeDrive will go nearer still. But the PDA makers need to spend a lot more on useability than they've done so far to compete against the phone boys. The Palm platform needs much better handling of Windows data, plus no-brainer communications set-up, and it doesn't have long to get it right as Bill Gates is betting that Windows Mobile 5.0 running on smartphones will deliver the coup de grace...