Why did PDAs not take off?

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Pic related.

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I had one of these. It was cool for a while but I had a lot of problems with it, IIRC after about 6 months it started getting really laggy and would lock up at least once a day.

Strange. I still have the one pictured and it still works great.

Can your mom help an user out, i have an mba - can't find a job.

Yeah, most people seem to have had no issues with theirs. I just have really bad luck with phones and tech stuff in general, if there's a rare bug or defect in something then I always seem to be the one who gets it.

The main problem with pdas were the stylus (no multitouch like smartphones now) and the shit windows ce software. Also the bezels and size prevented any normies from being seen with one in public. They were 100% for nerds. I had a Toshiba e805 back in the day and it was really amazing for it's time when everyone else had shitty flip phones, I remember playing quake and writing and compiling native c programs on it while in class, but once the iPhone and later Android's came out it now feels like a clunky piece of shit.

Sadly she can't either. She got the boot when her company got bought out and merged and never managed to find a comparable position again, she eventually gave up and retired about 10 years ago.

weren't they quite expensive back in the day?

Missed my treo 650, was a champ, lots of games and apps, even the stylus was pretty boss.

so much this. the last generation of pocketpc's were actually pretty good. i would love to see a modern take on it, but it won't happen. mobile phones took over so hard.

I still use a shitty flip phone, I've never owned a smart phone yet. Expensive , and I'm not just talking the price of the phone but the horrible cell phone plans out there.

I recently found my old ipaq pocketpc with mobile windows, bluetooth, quater gig of integrated memory, and it still had my wifi card in it. Such a blast from the past, of course now the ui seems terrible compared to todays dumbed down ones but its nostalgic never the less.

thats a smartphone tho

>why did PDAs not take off
they sort of did, but they were held back by a few things:
1: input: stylus, grafitti, small keyboards are all kind of good but clunky. Interfaces weren't designed to be touched with fingers.

2: market: while email and stuff has a market, it was served by other devices like blackberries... which eventually merged with cell phones. But software and content delivery (via high speed mobile data) were what catapulted the 'smartphone' to prevalence.

This is why we gave them kitchens.

Running Palm OS.

>PDAs are for content creators
Are you retarded? Do you even know what a PDA is?

Proprietary and did NOT like open competition. So tech went stale, got put on new platform and won over when they offered true options. Hardware should have been the sale. Not hardware and software.

>it's another boomer thread

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yeah, it's our board, so fuck off zoomer

You need to be 18 or older to post here

that's the point. pda's did catch on. they just evolved into treos and blackberry's and then thanks to apple modern smartphones.

You can still get corporate business oriented PDAs, but they all run Android now.

My dad had one of the early Palm Pilots with the B/W screen. He didnt care for it much and its in a box in the basement somewhere now

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I have always liked PDA's

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Closest thing to a PDA I ever had, well technically I do still have it. I got it on it's 2004 launch.

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sticky notes are cheaper

also PDAs survive as electronic taggers/loggers for retail, though some unlucky bastards are stuck using iPod Touches shoved into EMV card reader sleds.

>PDAs
>being connected and never offline
You weren't there.

You forgot Symbian.

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They were expensive and generally somewhat under-powered. And biggest factor, they were not designed to be fashion accessories so you were a "nerd" for using one if you weren't a manager

>shit windows ce software
>They were 100% for nerds
Palm OS wasn't. It was the iOS of its day.

>they were smartphones before smart phones was a thing.
Literally everyone has them, they're just called smartphones

>expensive for their specs
>office not media oriented
>user hostile interface
>resistive screens

They are essentially the same thing. People just call them smartphones

I've got this one a year before Iphone release. I think Iphone back then had around 25% of that Toshiba features.

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>office not media oriented
Not really, the later models all had audio output and could play videos. Some had cameras.
>user hostile interface
It wasn't designed for literal retards like the iPhone was, but they were pretty usable. Especially palm OS
>resistive screens
Good for accurate input and when you have to have small interface elements because you don't have a huge full HD screen.

because they ran windows and didn't have any applications.

I had one long before smart phones and I had it setup with wifi and bluetooth. I used it for checking email, FARK, and listening to mp3's. Everyone thought it was dorky as fuck until the iFag came out.

One nice thing about the stylus screens was no fingerprints. The bad side is you needed a stylus and looked like a nerd lol.

I want pdas to make a comeback
>tfw no desktop linux phone with a mobile de

You need to be over 18 to post here.

They did take off at the time and for their target market, as has been mentioned in this thread.

Unfortunately they were incredibly lackluster in connectivity, which is ironic considering the pitch for the devices, connectivity was always far behind everything else.

No native USB storage usually (muh hotsync products), and if one device has a feature you want, it doesn't have the others and vice versa with every other PDA.

Network support actually really sucked, at the end they were still making PDA's that had wifi and bluetooth etc, but the chipsets sucked and they never properly supported modern encryption or would lack the ability to update for it.

Hotsync was the main killer, with palm all the way through the windows ce line, "syncing" is a shit concept which requires regular upkeep or you wind up with your device docked with a desktop for hours updating things.

The reason smartphones killed PDA's off quickly is twofold, the faddish bullshit of apple with the iMeme popularizing smartphones is part of it, with their relentless marketing with AT&T at launch, but this carried with it more vendor lock-in with "sync" bullshit (itunes via usb syncing). The second however, sealed the deal to push smartphones into their current position: massive/easy/cheap/free online storage. For example, Dropbox was warming up around the same time (~2007), which I'm still butthurt about because I was trying to launch basically the same product at the time but didn't have silicon-bux to make it happen.

I still have mine

Why don't we have those reflective screens anymore like the ipaq in pic related? It made things much easier to read in direct sunlight

t. former jornada 720 owner

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The HTC Dream has a screen I've never seen on any other device. It's backlit but in direct sunlight works like a reflective display

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The shit OS

>Palm Pilots
youtube.com/watch?v=NacppJ_vWQg

The Gemini PDA lads said something similar, and it makes sense to me.

Gemini PDA, Librem 5 (more the software progress than the device), postmarketOS

price. it was prohibitively expensive in Europe, and most central and eastern Europe recently bankrupted from either communism either communism and the democratic government.

your average europoor saw his first "pda" as an android smartphone around 2013 with chink phones from aliexpress.

There was not much you could do with them for the average Joe except using it as a GPS which was probably even hard for a lot of people. There was no significant Youtube or Facebook content yet as they were not proven platforms yet. The teen market had not been explored yet except for phone wallpapers and ringtones which were expensive enough as they were.

I'm slav europoor, had both Palm IIIx and later iPaq 3670 with pcmcia sleeve and orinoco wifi card. Used to go online with T39/T68 over irda.

They where kinda expensive but always got them from gray/black market.

Palm III was very cool device, only thing missing was multitasking, ipaq I never liked.

i know, it was also common with businessmen and bankers, but not mass consumption.

iOS 1 was literally a dumbphone.
No App store, but the web browser was damn good for a handheld.

Because you have to separate the pixels in half, half of it to shine a backlight through and the other half with a light reflector. Screens have become bright enough these days for outdoor use.

a handheld gps will almost always have a transflective screen, since it's only used outdoors.
phone and laptop makers generally don't want to deal with the reduced image quality and increased expense, although it's an option on panasonic toughmemes.

too hard to use for retards.

I thought Panasonic just used superbright screens in the order of 1000cd/m, like 2-3x the majority of regular devices.

>why did PDAs not take off

They did. We call them phones today.

Good deals can be had, especially if you just use Wi-Fi for data.

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Spoken like an underage.

I miss that first-gen DS design. Nintendo sent me a shitty DS Lite when I sent mine in for repair because I thought it was having problems. Turned out to just be shitty game programming but the refused to send mine back. Fuck you Nintendo, that was and will be the last product I buy from you.

>sticky notes are cheaper
If you don't have a real use for a PDA, yes.
>muh win ce
There were other OSes too, kid, and lots of applications for all of them.
I miss the days when smartphones were actually interesting.

I really liked those PDAs, I never had the pleasure of owning one but they always fascinated me. A godfather of mine used to work for a medical company traveling up and down all over the country and he had one of these, this was back when all we had here in Brazil were dumbphones, that thing was legit fascinating with all its resources it had.

>this was back when all we had here in Brazil were dumbphones
So 2013?

huehuehue aehoooooooooooo, early 2000s, waaaaaay before we could even dream about smarthphones

They were expensive and mostly useless without a connection to corporate headquarters and served as an extension to desktop or laptop PCs. No entertainment features, not even a music player or camera, and it was for work and work only.

>t. former jornada 720 owner

Fuck I miss mine so much, it got stolen years ago. I've been saying this for a while but I wish somebody would make a decent clamshell keyboard case for the Galaxy Note 8, it'd make a really good modern Jornada replacement.

Finnish person here,

Here PDA:s never took off in part because Nokia communicators (and other symbian smartphones) were the shit that every company gave their employees when they needed such devices.

Wi-fi coverage was never too great here due to sparse population and lack of PDA-like devices, so mobile connections (GPRS/EDGE) were a big plus.

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>they were smartphones before smart phones was a thing.
You kinda answered your own question. A smartphone is just a PDA with an extra antenna and the ability to make calls. Stand-alone PDAs were in fact taking off up to the mid-2000s, but as Symbian phones gained more functionality in being something other than a phone and Palm or Pocket PC PDAs gradually added phone functionality, the two merged into one thing. And it was gradual, the devices couldn't make their own calls, but I remember pairing my Palm Pilot with the Bluetooth on my LG flip phone and using an app to get and make phone calls around 2002.

They did, though not with the average consumer. They were analogous to Blackberry now, surviving mainly off the professional market.

I was one of those weirdos who had a PDA in highschool. I loved that damn thing, and although smartphones are far more versatile there's something lacking in them which PDAs had, but I can't put my finger on what it was. Maybe I just miss the old Internet.

No one cared about Bezels in the mid 2000s.
Everyone and their mothers owned a Nokia back then.

my teacher let me use my PDA in math class to do calculations because she didn't know what it was

No anime wallpaper wtf.

>you wind up with your device docked with a desktop for hours updating things
Was it really ever that bad? I don't remember my Palm taking more than 5-10 minutes to sync.

I had an Acer N10, I put a 1GB MICRODRIVE in it when the largest CF cards were the super expensive 256mb.

Sucked battery life like no tomorrow and wifi connections were scarce, but it made me feel like I was living in the future with the amount of mp3s n shit I could put on it.

Then came the 30gb iPod photo and I gave the PDA away lol.

i couldn't afford one as a kid, the closest i got was a modded psp (which had all kinds of homebrew which bridged the gap anyway, with the right software it practically was a PDA, just without a touchscreen)

it was pretty great
reading documents, emails, light browsing.
also had a gps app.

got it from my job and had OPs pic as my second unit.
even was allowed to keep them afterwards.
have 3 in total now, still working tho the batteries are dead in all of them.

Trying to type on a PSP was god awful, it's browser was also absolute shit.

>Trying to type on a PSP was god awful
i got pretty decent at it
>it's browser was also absolute shit.
the one that came with 2.0+ was pretty basic, but there was also the option of running opera mini under pspkvm, which was much more capable
you can't really argue against it either, since opera mini was one of the best browsers on phones/pdas of the time, too

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Dude I can't blame you there. Those fucking slant eyed rice munchers are always trying to fuck over the white devils. Still, though, I feel that their systems are more 'video game consoles' rather than the 'mass multimedia home television computer systems' that Sony and MicroSoft offer.

see
they were niche devices that took off within a certain market (business) before wifi was common, and phones eventually turned into them but with better connectivity.

By the time PSP homebrew really took off, there were already netbooks and iphones which were much more capable for the internet.

PSP was prized for it's ability to emulate other consoles, and pirated games via the CR-5400.
I went from 1st gen PSP to the PSP-2007 Felicia Blue and then selling it when the 3007 came out and haven't used a PSP since.

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>no entertainment features
>literally thousands of games across a dozen platforms
Imagine being this misinformed.

I enjoy some anime, but I have never enjoined anime wallpapers. I prefer patterns or solid colors.