It’s time to call it out – PDAs have won over mobile handsets when it comes to our future personal mobile devices.
A few years ago, the debate was quite heated – do you invest money on a smartphone or on a PDA? Will the PDA conquer the mobile phone markets or will phones evolve to doing what PDAs are capable of?
Today the most heated battle is raging between Nokia, the gorilla of the mobile phone market, and RIM/Apple/Google with their PDAs-that-also-make-phone-calls. And by the way, it seems like for now Nokia is on the losing side.
A few weeks ago I replaced my trusted 
Nokia N85 with a shiny new toy – a Google Nexus One. After the initial shock in the first few days, I understood that what I essentially did was ditched a mobile phone for a PDA. Yes, it can do voice calls – but it’s way more complicated than on the N85. Yes, I can use the same old apps I installed on my N85 (and a lot more) on my new PDA, but now they were way easier to use.
The touch concept, that seems to be designed for PDAs (these general purpose mobile computing devices that should do everything), fails miserably when you just want to make a voice call. I mis-press digits and I need to shake it in mid-dialing so its screen saver will stop functioning. It’s like another application instead of THE application.
So don’t tell me about “smartphones” – they don’t exist anymore. It may be like a phone, but it’s not really smart in being “a phone”. Let’s call it by its real name – a PDA.
Tags: Apple, design, Google, Handset, handsets, Market, Mobile, mobile phone, Nexus One, Nokia, PDA, Smartphone
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