05-01-2003, 08:20 PM
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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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What We Want in Our PDAs
"Sales of personal digital assistants fell in the first quarter, but voice-enabled handset shipments rose 16.6 percent as compared to last year, according to research released by IDC Wednesday. Worldwide, vendors shipped 107.6 million units in the first quarter.
Voice is the "killer application" for handset devices right now, as both consumers and professionals want to be able to talk to associates and customers while also storing key data on a small device, said Alex Slawsby, an analyst with IDC. This is driving the growth of mobile phones, while sales of PDAs without voice features dropped in the first quarter, he said."
Waitaminute...I thought that consumers didn't want converged devices?
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05-01-2003, 08:38 PM
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Thoughts Media Review Team
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 749
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Personally, I think Alex is dreaming/hoping. As we've heard here (fairly strongly) there are essentially two camps -- one who want it all-in-one, and those who don't -- and I don't think that we're going to sway over one camp to the other in the near future.
I'm not sure there is a 'killer app' on the horizon that will spark huge sales of PDAs. The whole raison d'etre for PDAs was the 'organizer' stuff -- contacts, appts, etc. and now I see more and more people starting to use them as true 'Pocket PC's. Heck, at a training course last week, a bunch of the guys were showing off their Tide Table software for Palm!
I think what we're going to see next is the 'productization' of the PDA -- much the same as the desktop PC -- you won't really care what brand it is, just the features, hardware, and built in capabilities. (And... does it run the software I already have????)
__________________
/drt
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05-01-2003, 08:44 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 209
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Consumers want flexibility.
They want a PPC Phone Edition and a phone that will that will accept their SIM card.
They want these two to work well together, but also work well apart.
They also want fries with that.
__________________
And there you are.
I was just thinking, "What could take this headache I have over that edge to a full blown migrane?"
And there you are.
- Dr. Cox, Scrubs
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05-01-2003, 08:44 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Jul 2002
Posts: 193
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Convergence
So does this mean people want convergance but aren't willing to pay for it until it is all implemented well. Voice i think will be important to the use of pocket pcs in the future. thumbboards are still hard to type on and it is annoying to bring a keyboard everywhere. So soon pocketword, with voice dictation? I would love to see it, but i imagine more speed and space is needed before those kind of voice capabilities are reached. Anyways it is nice to see the industry moving towards this.
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05-01-2003, 09:02 PM
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Swami
Join Date: May 2004
Posts: 4,396
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Good Timing
This is good timing. I just wrote a rant on my Web site about the one-piece/two-piece debate. I want both. :-)
Steve
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05-01-2003, 09:16 PM
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Pontificator
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 1,202
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Re: Convergence
Quote:
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Originally Posted by danmanmayer
So does this mean people want convergance but aren't willing to pay for it until it is all implemented well.
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I agree. I personally think people want convergance, but we have yet to see the type of convergance most people want. People (myself) included want all the PPC functionality with a phone in a product the size of a small cell phone.
I have a T-Mobile XDA, but it's rare that I actually use it as a phone anymore. It's just too big for me to carry around everywhere. If I could have the same functions (plus built in bluetooth) in a device the size of the IPAQ 1910 I wouldn't see the need to use the second phone.
It's a shame that nobody seems to want to deliver this convergence in the PPC camp. There are actually a couple of fairly small form-factor Palm phones due out...but even those are using 4.x of the Palm OS and the old dragonball processors. Nobody has yet delivered, or even announced a cell phone sized PPC/Palm solution using the latest OS and processor speed. That in my estimation is the "killer app" everyone is waiting for.
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05-01-2003, 09:19 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Jun 2002
Posts: 155
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DUH! the killer application. The killer application has been the one key item that have cellular/wireless providers must have. I have been the telecom business(GSM) since 1994, and we are still talking about the killer application for cell phones/pda's/smart phones/what ever you want to call the device.
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05-01-2003, 09:24 PM
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Thinker
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 414
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Who said people don't want converged devices?
I sure do. I wan't a PPC with camera. If it comes with a phone and the cell company will give it to me if I sign a contract, so much the better. The music player function of an I-Pod (adding a 10 gig or larger HD to a PDA) would also make it a better device, if the price was right.
I am not sure the PDA feature set is done with the current models. It sometimes seems that a model like the Axim, or the Ipaq 5450 has all one really expects of a PDA, but then there are these other devices, even totally new ones like the I-Pod that dump the apple cart out and make everyone go back to the drawing boards.
That is what makes PDAs still so interesting while Desktops are so boring.
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05-01-2003, 09:39 PM
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Theorist
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 263
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As soon as a clear consumer trend shows, Steve Jobs will be there with something, my $0.02.
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05-01-2003, 09:48 PM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Feb 2003
Posts: 55
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I don't
I was going to say that I don't want a converged device and, in fact, I want nothing like the converged devices I've seen. The screen makes a PDA too big to be a phone (or a phone screen too small to be a PDA). The built-in cameras are just getting above the 2 MegaPixel range. And, of course, it's less expensive for me to replace my old camera than a whole PDA with a built-in camera.
So I was thinking that I, at least, prefer my devices to be separate but, at the very least, able to read each other's cards for easy transfer.
Then I thought, what about a device that has a number of "drone" add-ons. These drones wouldn't have to have all the functionality of their stand-alone counterparts but, rather, would draw upon the intelligence built into the Pocket PC and, of course, they'd connect via BlueTooth. So a camera module would have the CCD and the buttons, but it wouldn't need storage or intelligence in itself. It just takes a picture and saves it to the Pocket PC. A cell-phone module would have all the basic buttons, and the cellular radio, but it would draw contacts from your PPC and be able to "wake up" the PPC when you want to do something more than just send/receive a call. That kind of pseudo-convergence is more what I want.
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Linear Mode
