RHODesign.com has published a
blog today on the Mini PC vs. the PDA. The author rants on the mistakes made by current PDA manufactures and the future of where the industry could be going. He makes some very good points about the consumers likes and dislikes.
I'm convinced that the future of PDAs / smart phones / whatever is none of the current devices but rather a PC (or Mac) in pocket form
But why?
1.) People are lazy. Apart from a few % of the population, no one wants to have to learn new things.
2.) People are used to one specific desktop OS (mostly Windows), and that's what they want to stick with.
3.) People invested in software for their desktop, they don't want to do this all over again.
4.) People invested in time to optimize their desktop PC environment and invested in time learning it, they don't want to invest this time all over again.
And finally I believe that rather instead of having mobile phones becoming smarter and smarter to take over PDAs (as everyone today thinks the trend is), I feel that the opposite will happen: in 5 years from now PCs (or hopefully Macs) will be 'pocketable' and come with a built-in 3G or GPRS datacard (as well as WiFi and Bluetooth) to provide Voice over IP phone services
I believe he is on the right track. That Pocketable PCs will become smarter and smartphones may be replaced by these smarter devices. The flaw that I see are that "pocketable" pcs imply that they will replace the laptop or notebook and I don't think that you can replace the 15" viewable screen experience with a "pocketable pc". Consumers will always want a bigger and bigger viewing area as we see happening in the television industry. Yes they have made pocketable televisions but the market is buying the bigger and sharper screens not the smaller televisions to take on the go.
This
article is definetly worth a read, it helps you to think about this industry in different ways.
What do you think?
