Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Why, because it's one of the few cases where a multi-purpose device truly routed a dedicated one?  |
Nope, because they didn't.
The original Palm Pilot could be considered a dedicated device. It had an 8mhz Motorola Dragonball processor, a whopping 2MB of RAM, and PalmOS and applications in firmware. It wasn't terribly expandable, as external storage wasn't an option, and you had to fit both your data and any third-party programs you installed into those 2MB of RAM.
But that didn't last long. The PDA filled a need and created a market, and devices based on that model rapidly increased in power and expandibility, gaining faster processors, more RAM, and external storage options. The PDA I use is an example: a 200mhz ARM CPU, 128MB of RAM, a 320x480 screen in 65K colors, driven by an ATI video chip with 2D acceleration and 8MB of video RAM, bluetooth radio, IR, and two SD card slots. Aside from standard organizer functions, it can display JPGs and play MP3s with bundled software. Added third party software lets me play video, view and edit documents and spreadsheets, view ebooks in a number of formats, browse the web and get email (via an add-on Wifi card), program in Assembler, Basic, Brainf*ck, C, Lua, Pascal, Python, Rexx, Tcl and a few other things, and oh, yes...play games.
What savaged the PDA was a recapitulation of the PC market, an order of magnitude faster. When Palm first offered the Pilot and created a market, PDAs were must haves, and vendors like Palm, Handspring, and Sony couldn't make them fast enough. But the market rapidly saturated, PDAs became commodities with commodity pricing, and
really low-end dedicated organizer devices grabbed the segment of the market that only wanted an organizer because they were cheaper. Margins were paper thin, and people like Sony got out of the market because while the Clie line was profitable, it wasn't profitable
enough.
PDA manufacturers were faced with the challenge of what they could do in subsequent generations of devices that would add sufficient value to allow them to charge higher prices and make better margins. For the most part, they failed to come up with anything.
Meanwhile, cell phones were becoming steadily more powerful, morphing into feature phones, and then smartphones. They ate the PDA market share from the high end, by adding PDA functions. Being able to use the device as a phone as well as a PDA
was a value-add users would pay for.
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Dennis