MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Is the Traditional PDA Market Tapped Out?

scstraus · 08-24-2004, 12:19 PM

Yeah, the bottom line is that these things are not fully realized in today's PDA's. They are too hard to use and require too much tinkering. If the PDA makers get their act together and make things like video and internet and ebooks simple, they will have a market by the end of this decade. If they don't, they won't.

I would like to see the day where I can just pull up a quick list of books directly from my PDA and have one beamed to me, or when I insert a DVD into my PC I can drag it onto my PDA. This is the level of ease that the average user requires, and honestly I don't do a lot of things like video because it's just too time consuming.

To really watch any amount of video on my PDA, I have to spend almost the same amount of time screwing around to get it on there. These things have to be built into the OS in a simple way which brings the functionality to the average user.

Tapwave's doing a decent job with games, and over the air download works reasonably well on the treo (but much better with handzipper installed). But all this stuff needs to be basic OS functionality to become useful to the other 95% of PDA users.

08-24-2004, 12:19 PM	#17
scstraus Member Posts: 22 Karma: 29 Join Date: Aug 2004	PDA makers need to get their act together. Yeah, the bottom line is that these things are not fully realized in today's PDA's. They are too hard to use and require too much tinkering. If the PDA makers get their act together and make things like video and internet and ebooks simple, they will have a market by the end of this decade. If they don't, they won't. I would like to see the day where I can just pull up a quick list of books directly from my PDA and have one beamed to me, or when I insert a DVD into my PC I can drag it onto my PDA. This is the level of ease that the average user requires, and honestly I don't do a lot of things like video because it's just too time consuming. To really watch any amount of video on my PDA, I have to spend almost the same amount of time screwing around to get it on there. These things have to be built into the OS in a simple way which brings the functionality to the average user. Tapwave's doing a decent job with games, and over the air download works reasonably well on the treo (but much better with handzipper installed). But all this stuff needs to be basic OS functionality to become useful to the other 95% of PDA users.