Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Smart Phones Will Not Mean the End of Handhelds
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "ARTICLE" @ 05:00 AM
http://brighthand.com/article/Will_Smart_Phones_Replace_Handhelds
"I wish I had a dollar for every article I've read lately on how handhelds are doomed because they are going to be replaced by smart phones. Saying that makes no sense to me, because, at its root, a smart phone is a handheld."
I think Ed Hardy is talking about semantics, as he later gets into. "Why we've decided to call handhelds with mobile phone capabilities "smart phones" isn't particularly clear to me. And any time you want to start an argument, try to get a couple of people to agree on what a smart phone is. Just about everyone has a different idea of where cellular-wireless handhelds leave off and where smart phones begin."
I think handhelds as we know them, typically disconnected devices and with no voice capabilities will be replaced with converged devices and those we typically call smart phones will dominate. Smart phones are devices that are more phone than PDA, though there will, for the foreseeable future, be room for larger PDA-like devices that have phones built in. I think we'll see more compact devices like the Motorola MPx rather than the large screens seen in the XDA formfactor.
"I wish I had a dollar for every article I've read lately on how handhelds are doomed because they are going to be replaced by smart phones. Saying that makes no sense to me, because, at its root, a smart phone is a handheld."
I think Ed Hardy is talking about semantics, as he later gets into. "Why we've decided to call handhelds with mobile phone capabilities "smart phones" isn't particularly clear to me. And any time you want to start an argument, try to get a couple of people to agree on what a smart phone is. Just about everyone has a different idea of where cellular-wireless handhelds leave off and where smart phones begin."
I think handhelds as we know them, typically disconnected devices and with no voice capabilities will be replaced with converged devices and those we typically call smart phones will dominate. Smart phones are devices that are more phone than PDA, though there will, for the foreseeable future, be room for larger PDA-like devices that have phones built in. I think we'll see more compact devices like the Motorola MPx rather than the large screens seen in the XDA formfactor.
