Back in the early 2000’s it is obvious from looking at statistics that the handheld computing market was changing into something else. Not that people dislike the idea of carrying around a computer in the pocket, but rather it is a matter of what kind of functionality this computer should have. Traditionally the PDA market has been focused around the idea of the “PIM” – personal information manager. Now it looked more that it was going to be centred around a communication device (phone or phone/email/chat/whatever), and/or a music player (like an iPod). Remember that PDAs were introduced long before there were mobile phones that you could carry in your pocket. As an consumer electronics designer in the early 2000’s, you would have a number of “building blocks” that you could potentially combine together as a consumer device:
- Phone
- Chat
- Camera (still)
- Camera (video)
- Music Player
- PIM
- GPS
- Document viewer
- Photographs viewer
- Film viewer
- etc
Now in 2026 we know what combination of features that “took over” the market. It is the smart-phone, and it centered around communications, media consumption and the Internet. Remember that already towards the end of the PDA era, several companies made attempts to combine phone and PDA-functionality. One of the first attempts was the Bellsouth/IBM Simon, a very large and heavy portable phone for the American AMPS cellular system that included some PIM functionality. IBM sold this in partnership with Bell. I have one of those in my collection. I doubt it was a successful product due to its inconvenient size and weight. Only when the ”PDA-phones” shrunk to the size of the Ericsson R380 there was a chance that they would become popular. One of the more popular ones was the Nokia Communicator (not featured here yet).
So basically when the smart-phones, best represented by Apples iPhone, included all the functionality that was part of a typical PDA, there was no longer a need for a separate product category called PDA.
This is what HP, one of the PDA giants had to say on the matter of traditional PDAs (Cnet News March 2006):
According to Hewlett-Packard (HP), the traditional pen-based PDA market will evaporate within the next four years without significant product innovation. The company will therefore continue to focus the majority of its handheld efforts on converged smart phone devices, relegating its traditional PDAs to the entry-level consumer and SMB markets
“There’s still a market… it’s small, but it’s still there,” Chin-Teik said, citing “entry-level PDA” buyers and SMBs as the primary sources of demand for the sector.
“We are still committed to the pen-based classic PDA product segment… although it’s not growing,” said Chin-Teik, and as a result HP “is looking more to the converged space” going forward.
The last “pure” PDA marketed was probably the Palm Tx. It was announced and released as part of Palm’s October 2005 product cycle, and was in production until March 2009.