08-19-2002, 04:00 PM
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Contributing Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Jun 2003
Posts: 1,350
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iPhone: Apple working on a phone/PDA combo?
http://makeashorterlink.com/?V2A152E81
It's that time of year again, where rumors are spread that Apple is working on re-entering the handheld market. As to some a new Newton is similar to the Holy Grail, those people might rejoice. But if this New York Times article (source: BrightHand) is correct, the new device will not be Newton like. Last years rumored Apple PDA was the iWalk. This years rumor is called the iPhone. According to an article in the New York Times, Steve Jobs sees no future for the PDA, but he sees a future for phones having PDA capabilities.
"We decided that between now and next year, the P.D.A. is going to be subsumed by the telephone," he said last week in an interview. "We think the P.D.A. is going away." And even while protesting that the company had no plans to introduce such a device, he grudgingly acknowledged that combining some of Apple's industrial design and user-interface innovations would be a good idea in a device that performed both phone and computing functions."
First of all, I like the use of the word "decided". I think most of you will agree that phones with PDA capabilities will have a big future. But I don't see PDAs in itself go away. There might be a big move from disconnected PDAs to the new connected kind ( like the T-Mobile / O2 XDA / HP Jornada 928 WDA etc. ), but I feel there will always be a market where users would like a bigger screen and better input methods, but they would still want their device to be pocketable, and not luggable.
In the article some analysts are quoted, where they state that several features in the new Macintosh OS software would make more sense in a hand-held device than a desktop computer. "Of the 12 new OS X features the company has been emphasizing on its Web site, most would be desirable for a hand-held phone, including chat capabilities, mail, an address book, calendar features, automatic networking and a synchronization feature that will become available in September. And several of the features, including the company's handwriting-recognition technology and Sherlock information-retrieval program, would be much more relevant to a small, portable device than to a desktop computer. Sherlock in particular has been repositioned in a way that would make it a perfect counterpart for a portable phone. Its original purpose, which was finding files and content on the computer's local disk, has been transformed into a more general "find" utility program. Now, Sherlock is being extended to search for types of information like airline and movie schedules and restaurant locations. The software can display maps and driving directions."
Somehow I get the feeling that some people are so desperate to see Apple return in the PDA market, that they're labelling everything Apple does as a sure sign it's going to return. But is it a sign, or just a lost sandal?
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