Este post foi agregado pelo meu lifelog. É possível que eu não seja o autor.
(Taps microphone: "is this thing on?")
I've been neglecting this blog a little of late. Sorry 'bout that; I've been busy — I'm currently working on my third novel of the year, and though it won't be finished by Hogmanay I've managed to just about double my work output relative to last year, albeit at the price of being frequently absent from these parts.
Today I want to talk about ... well, I had a couple of things in mind. I'm gearing up for a discussion of Closure in fiction, which is kind of on my mind right now because I'm writing the sixth and final book in a series and I need to tie up, if not everything, then at least enough Important Stuff to satisfy my readers. (NB: This is not necessarily going to be the last Merchant Princes book ever; it's just the natural end of the current series, and the last one I'm currently under contract for. So no need to yell at me. Okay?) And then my gizmo habit caught up with me and told me I want to write about something different. Like: who killed the PDA?
I remember the first time I ever saw a PDA in the wild: the shock of the new. It was 1991, and I was riding the Metropolitan Line in London, in a mostly-empty carriage. And a man sitting opposite me reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out one of these and unfolded it and started typing on it with his thumbs.
Now, be aware that in 1991 laptops were not unheard-of. (I actually owned one; a 286 with 2Mb of RAM and a 20Mb hard disk.) Pocket-sized PCs were not unheard-of; the HP-100, the Poquet, HP-95LX, and Atari Portfolio were all out there already, running DOS. Psion's Organiser machines had developed a solid niche in business (mostly in stock-taking and EPOS applications). But this thing was something a little bit different. With an icon-driven interface, a suite of productivity apps (address book, alarm clock, agenda), and a link to a software suite running on a desktop PC with which it synchronised, it made no pretence whatever at being a PC. It was a PC companion, a new type of gizmo.
There was of course another model for the PC companion: the Apple Newton. Newton was John Sculley's pet project, allegedly started after a high-level Apple meeting in which he realized everyone present was using a Cambridge Z88, and said "why don't we make one of those?" The target market was seen as management, 1989 style: folks who didn't use keyboards. So the Newton project focussed on the idea of a touch-screen and a pen and handwriting recognition. Conceptually it was far ahead of its time; practically, it fell flat on its face for the first couple of iterations — the computing power to do full cursive handwriting recognition on the fly simply wasn't available in 1990. Apple's engineers persisted, and they were close to getting it right with the Messagepad 2100 in 1998 when the entire division was shut down: there's still a fanatical fan-base for the Newton OS even to this day.
Apple's inability to get handwriting recognition to work was another company's entry: Palm started out as a software company, selling Graffiti as a simplified, much more computationally tractable shorthand for PDAs (as the new category of machines were known). Subsequently, they looked at their software, and at the Newton, and thought "why does the computer need to be so big and heavy to do the job?" The original Palm was a fraction the size of the Newton (which typically weighed 0.5-0.6Kg — as much as a modern Asus Eee 701). It did very little, serving essentially as a smart Filofax that could synchronize with a desktop PC. And it sold like hot cakes.
Microsoft, of course, took one look at the competing PDA models from Palm and Psion, and declared war. The resulting mess of trademark-compatible embedded operating systems (Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Pocket PC, Windows Smartphone — go on, you untangle the family tree!) sold well enough to take the #2 spot (after Psion's management in 1999 made the most momentously bad decision in British personal computing history and surrendered to Microsoft's bluff). But even Microsoft haven't been making money out of PDAs. The sorry truth is, PDAs are a commercial rat-hole. The only folks who really made money at them were Psion (hors de combat) and Palm (whose abject failure to modernize their OS since 2001 amounts to the longest drawn-out suicide in portable computing history).
What were PDAs good for, and what killed them?
Well, they're not entirely dead yet — the corpse is still twitching. Sitting on my desk is an HP iPaq 214 enterprise PDA. By the computing standards of the year 2000, it's a bit of a monster: it has a 614MHz processor, 128Mb of RAM, about 16Gb of storage (expandable to 64Gb), a VGA screen with 3D graphics acceleration, Wifi and Bluetooth and USB, and it weighs around 200 grams — a third as much as the last generation Newton. It also cost about a quarter as much. The times, they have been changing. Even Microsoft eventually got it not too terribly wrong with Windows Mobile 6.x; with some tweaking by HP, it's not entirely vile, and it doesn't crash very often.
Yet despite delivering the initial promise of the Newton — yes, you can scribble anywhere on the screen and it will decode your notes; yes, it does the agenda and contacts and notepad stuff well; it also takes voice memos; it's got a decent word processor and spreadsheet on board; it's a desert topping and a floor wax — it's fundamentally obsolete.
It turns out that people don't want that stuff in a notepad-shaped machine. What they want is a mobile phone that does the address book/agenda stuff — and is an entertainment gadget besides, with a camera and music player built in. Sure the iPaq can play MP3s and videos, and even some games, but it's a Serious Business Tool, like an executive's bulging Franklin Covey planner. The market for such gizmos is vanishingly small compared to the market for iPhones which don't even have cut and paste, or Blackberry devices, which have a keyboard so bad it would have caused Psion's 1990s engineers to piss themselves laughing.
What seems to have happened is that sub-notebook sized PCs got better, and cheaper, until you can buy an entry-level Eee for about the same as the serious-end PDA, with a keyboard and a bigger screen and some proper laptop-grade applications. The signal failure of the UMPC market to take off, coupled with the explosive growth of Netbooks, seems to demonstrate that folks who use computers and want a mobile device want a real computer that has shrunk in the wash, not some bizarre tablet thingy that forces them to write with a pen. Sculley's 1989 executives might not have known how to use a keyboard, but it's 2009 now, and only luddites and geriatrics have failed to come to terms with QWERTY over the intervening two decades. The keyboard has won, as long as you class such abominations as Apple's on-screen touch keyboard for the iPhone as a real keyboard. (Look ma! No moving parts!) And the mobile phone has won the other battle, for control of that Filofax full of contacts. When the iPhone overtook the Motorola RAZR as the #2 top-selling contract mobile phone in the US, the writing was on the wall for dumb phones. The PDA concept survives — in the shape of devices with built in phones, and cameras, and annoyingly small keyboards. At the high end, it's been subsumed into the laptop market by way of Netbooks — many of which now come with SIM slots and 3G phone connections. But as a stand-alone computing device, where does the PDA go from here?
I've burned through a remarkable number of PDAs over the past two decades. I was a staunch Psion user until they quit the field, despite a brief fling with Newton. Then I transferred my loyalties to Palm, although I've had a few one night stands with Windows CE (mostly followed by morning-after regrets). I've been more flexible with phones: I hung on with Palm's Treos long after I should have given up, and I've even flirted with Symbian, the obese, hectoring descendant of Psion's once-svelte and seductive EPOC/32 operating system. But I'm now looking at my desktop. There are two devices on it: the powerful, grown-up iPaq with a decade of software development behind it, and the new upstart iPhone. And I know where the future lies.
This iPaq is probably going to be my last-ever PDA. by the time you factor in a case, a folding keyboard, and some storage cards it costs as much and weighs as much as a netbook, and does less. And I don't see that equation ever changing back again. The iPhone may acquire more PDA-like features (such as cut and paste, and an external keyboard, and a word processor), but no amount of tweaking will turn an iPaq into a rival for a netbook. It's probably the last of its kind, or near enough as makes no difference, the swan song for a computing niche that once looked promising, spawned a thousand hopeful startups, and is now dwinding to a dot of light in the centre of a darkened screen.
And that, my friends, is the secret of narrative closure.
