Editorial: The sad truth about Handheld and Pocket PC's

As Microsoft slowly tightens its stranglehold on the PDA world, but yet struggles to make a profit from it's Windows Mobile consumer division. John Ottini throws caution to the wind and asks the question

"Do people really care for PDA's?"

View: The sad truth about Handheld and Pocket PC's

Hey, John has a good point. At the moment, no one in the mass market really needs a handheld, or PDA in general. However a lot of people in the business market do require some form of a PDA.

But then again, the same could be said about PCs, laptops, and mobile phones - each of them were invented for and marketed towards the businessman. But over years (or even decades) of development, each of them eventually found the market for the "average Joe".

Laptops are a particularly interesting case. Most people don't need their PCs to be portable (maybe) 5 years ago. Now everyone could use the convenience of one, and most people are willing to pay the difference in price, as the general pricing has gone down so much over the years anyway. The performance have raised to the point that laptops are more than capable for all jobs that the average Joe uses it for. The desktop PCs are now in turn in the niche market of gamers and video editors (pros or amateurs), as far as the mass market goes. In the business world desktops are still a very logical solution of course.

Similarly, and as many are predicting, smartphones will replace the mobile phones as we know it today. Most people do not need their mobile phones to be "smart" at the moment. But eventually they will like them enough, and the prices will go down enough, that it will make sense to shell out for a smartphone instead. Much the same way consumers are buying laptops instead of desktops even though they don't need to.

Handhelds, or PDAs in general, are a long way from replacing the laptop. But eventually (is this the third time I used that word?) they will be cheap enough, fast enough, and convenient enough to do that exact thing - replace the laptop in the mass market, leaving the laptop in a future niche market and the traditional business market. Are we there yet? Not even close. But as Yoda would say, hard to see the future is.

Yet we've criticized OEMs in other threads here for marketing handhelds toward businesspeople. I'm not sure I agree with John that people "need" computers (either desktop or notebook) in the same sense that they "need" TVs. If they do, I think it's primarily because of the Internet. Once broadband becomes the norm, and we no longer have to look for WiFi hotspots, handheld Web browsing will become a huge commodity - and people will get tired of the tiny screens on their cell phones (and the clumsy use of the number pad as a full keyboard) when browsing the Web.

As far as video games go - hey, we've shown that we can port almost anything to the PDA. We have exact emulators of thousands of arcade games now available for Pocket PCs. One of my nephews teased me for a long time about my gadgets - then, like almost every kid in America today, he "needed" a PSP. (Has anyone noticed how much these handheld game modules have come to resemble PDAs, with styli, infrared communication, etc?) Now I tease him because I can do what he does and more.

Besides, for a product to be successful, it doesn't have to be for everybody. My dirt bike is an example. A rather small minority of poeple are into dirt-bike riding, yet my bike model has been a highly successful product line for Honda that's been around for 30 years, and just keeps getting better. If anything, it's more popular than ever - enough to bring the price down about 25% (without factoring in inflation) over the past five or six years.

It really doesn't matter what the facts are, whether a pocketpc/hpc is needed or not...it's the perception that counts. Unfulfilled prophecy. Pygmallion all over again. If enough people (especially those who think they own the vision of what the world wants) believe that pocketpcs and hpcs are a dying industry and a waste of investment money...then the world of portable small computers is going to dry up and disappear.

Once there was a plethora devices from many manufacturers...but even now we see the choices dwindling to just a few major players.

I've been predicting for a while now, and still predict, that eventually everything available will be targeted towards smartphone technology and if we want to be portable without a laptop, we are just going to have to accept it. We are a niche audience, and we will always be one.

Rich

One thing that comes to mind for me is the longevity problems. I first got a Jornada 545, and buy the time I was ready to update there had only been one updated device released, the 560. I converted to compaq and got a 3870, but they were on the 3rd series if I remember, it went 36xx, 37xx, then 38xx.
By the time I was ready do upgrade again, there had been so many new devices I did know any of them, or to tell the truth like any of them.

I got used to what I had and would have got another one like it, but they had changed everything I knew several times over. Customers dont like this, radical change is sometimes bad. Now is this constant new device release, that was going on there for a long while, keeping the costs high due to retooling and production costs.

Things seem to have slowed down now, but with the release of CE5 I can see a bevy of new devices out any time now and it starts all over again. This is why you dont see them in the big stores now, they are afraid as soon as they get stock, its out dated and wont sell. This is also one of the reasons Dell has kept prices down and sales raising (I think).

HP needs to settle down, build an Ipaq again and keep it to 3 models that stay around for a lot longer. Oh and I realy think they should bring back at least one HPC.

Rich - Isn't that what makes this community better than the others? Yes, we are small. But we are better in one major way: We make the most out of what we have. With that alone, this community can do many things. There are probably quite a few people on here with great electronic and programming abilities, and with those, we can get our devices to the way we want them to be. And that's all that matters, right?

People nowadays get caught up in believing that they need more speed, power, and memory to do simple things. It drives me crazy when companies (like dell) advertise the lower end "student" computers. Let me tell them something, all a student needs (if they even need a computer at all...) is a pentium II (at most), with 64mb of ram, 2gb of hard drive space, and a printer. Advertising a 2ghz computer as all students need is annoying, because that computer can do a lot more than schoolwork.

Our H/PC's are all we need to organize our lives, and if everyone thinks about it that way: we have won the competition with ppc's. Unfortunately, the thing holding us back is not hardware, but software. CE is ridiculously behind in many ways, and almost every single one of those (correction - with skill, EVERY one of those) can be fixed. I have been working tirelessly on getting a fully-functional Linux distribution out to everyone who wants it on their 720, but I know that only a small portion of this community wants that. Many of them just want CE to be perfect, the way it once was.

Now, lets get to the skills of the users on this forum. We have several people who can program, and another few who have great expertise in electronics. Of course, there must be many more who have not yet shown what they can do. Pretty much, the only thing stopping us from getting there is anyone doing anything.

And of course, there is me. But I am still learning. Currently I can hardly code a script, and much of my knowledge is configuring things over and over again until they eventually work perfectly. And I am quickly becoming proficient in electronics. But it is going to be another year or two until I can do the most advanced kind of things. Now, one thing that I have realized is that all this is timed. The more we wait, the less support we will have. Two or three years ago, these projects probably would have been done very quickly. But now...people are leaving. Not that quickly, but all those great programmers and modders for this platform are moving on. It is only to be expected for something that was discontinued years ago. Although, I was on this forum since a few months after the beginning, and am impressed to see the user count go from under 100 to over 800. Although, something I noticed before is that only a hundred or so of those users actually post.

I do know this thread is on how both ppc's and hpc´s will disappear.

Personally, I do not believe this at all. In a sense. The palm handhelds, which were big at one point, have been hurt by MS pretty badly. Unfortunately, MS is not going to keep the ppc's going forever in the palmish form, so all they did was hurt the entire pda platform. As far as ppc's, they are definitely going into the cell/pda form. Why? Whoever came up with that idea was crazy. But for some reason, phones have now become pda's. I like pda's as seperate devices, they are more effective that way. Oh well.

Clam shell devices, though liked very much in design, never did seem to do very well. People like them when they are very powerful, and the second they aren't, leave them. The apple emate, the H/PC's, and others. They never did last very long, but this could just be related to marketing problems (except in the case of the emate...apple just does not do very well). Yet laptops, even over five years old, still seem to be used by people regularly. I believe this is caused by the same thing that makes H/PC's better than other portables: Instant on. These devices have their OS in rom, whether flashable or not. Either way, it seriously cripples the system when it comes to updating them, especially after that model is not officially supported anymore. This is because we cannot simply upgrade our handhelds like laptops. The same problem occurs to ppc's, but not as much.

If we were truly to upgrade our handhelds to the point of being reasonable today...well - we can't. The best thing would be to replace the ROM board with a flash one, even better a flash board with an extra 512mb flash ram chip on the side. That would be upgradeable. To get it to be a new device would need a whole new board, with a better processor, and modern connecting devices.

Perhaps, the only thing holding us back is the way CE was designed in the first place: It was always just a bit limited.

In one word, games my friend, games. ... ...

What is it about H/PC's and PPC's that make them less than a "hot" item?
IMO, it was/is the many different chip architectures AND, thanks to Microsoft, the too many changes and subsequent restictions in the operating systems.
I'm in a world between the "Business User" and the "Average Joe": Plant field constuction. What was once an almost perfect tool, my J728, has become an antiquity by the supposedly improved hardware meant to improve upon the utility of said H/PC.
Instead, what I have is now a collection of various H/PC's and PPC's that can't utilize each other's programs and even sync methods. It's an absurdity that I don't have time to deal with anymore, and that's the bottom line!

I still say it's Internet access. Make the connection process (both network and modem) more user-friendly, and wait a while . . . people will start coming back.

Edited by CE Geek 2005-10-16 2:08 PM

Long live the HPC.

I remember recently at the coffee shop, I was standing amongst a group of teenagers with PPCs. Some were Palms, but they were all the same style...
PPC User: "I've got a 624MHz X-Scale proccessor with 128MB RAM and 16MB 3D Graphics Accellerator. What's yours got?"
I had to think of something quick...
"Uh, 168?"
They all cracked up laughing. I couldn't stand it...
"Okay, then let's see you guys type the sentence: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs." Go!"
They frantically reached for their styluses and one even tried to get out his infrared keyboard. But it was too late. I had won. They all shared the same dismal expression on their faces. The harsh realization that their high-end PPCs were designed for multimedia and time-wasting, not real life.

And before, they were talking about using only the PPCs to get them through college...

I believe in the near future, some smart company will design an HPC aimed at these poor coffee-shop dudes, before it's too late. In my opinion, the HPC is the perfect design. HPCs may seem to be dying out, but they will return...

TRUE! PgmSynth...it is either misery loves company, or we are all brothers with a common cause...

HP/C's are nice, but are for a different type of consumer. I miss the simple elegance of the first Palm's. Slip them in your pocket, and they are there for instant checking of Calendar, contacts, memo's, etc. So many people want multitasking, but don't really need it, we end up with another crappy microsoft OS that needs constant resetting. If you don't do much typing, HP/C's have no advantage. I know kids that type faster on thumboards than I do on a full keyboard.

That's right! I believe the myriad of chip architectures played a major role in making HPCs and early PPCs less attractive to both software developers and users, which ultimately ended up in pathetic sales.

The later PPCs started turning up in the StrongArm, and then XScale cpu architecture, which are somewhat compatible, and that led to good pickup of sales. Of cos the sleaker and cooler designs for later PPCs also gave the users the extra nudge, but the ability to continue to use apps that one already own, definitely makes existing users consider an upgrade to newer PPCs and non users to consider owning one.

I would believe that the decline in demands for PPCs is partly a saturation of market and partly a migration effect of users from PPCs to smartphone devices. And yes, I have no stats to back up my statements ... ... just good old gut-feel analysis ...

i appreciate that your opinion differs from mine, but i think you're not right about the "crappy microsoft OS". of course, i'm not a big fan of MS, but they made hpc's basically... palm never cared about the type of user i am. (yes i need multitasking, and keyboard - using both all the time.)
your remark about thumbboards is very interesting, i think i could never get used to them really. now i just got this bsquare PHH as a phone, but i'm sure will never do much input on that keyboard (thumbboard)... oh and i did use a keyboard that was only a little better than a thumbboard, on my first PDA, which was a psion 3a. i always hated that keyboard and when i finally got a PC i gave up on using it... took years to find a *real* keyboard (psion 5mx and hpc's)!
so, all i wanted to say is that people are different!

but is this relevant to the original topic...? i think so,... maybe many ppl just don't need a computer, either PC or pda. but most of them need an organizer and phones are great for this especially now that they're already so common. then, many of them like to take photos with those crappy cameras in phones and then view them... listen to mp3's... games... and so on. so the pda can survive only if it becomes integrated with phones.
ok, it can survive as a standalone product but then i'm not sure if everyone starts using them. this would need a different world (which may come one day in the future).

hm i lost track.. how did i want to make that relevant to my original answer?

Edited by cmonex 2005-10-17 8:17 AM

The thumb-boards drive me crazy. I know some people who are faster on the thumb-board than I am on the H/PC keyboard, as cmonex or snappy! said. However when I have taken my H/PC out in public, (very rarely) people just look at it oddly...

Joseph