Thread: Maemo Advocacy
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Posts: 631 | Thanked: 1,123 times | Joined on Sep 2005 @ Helsinki
#211
Originally Posted by fpp View Post
Thanks for asking such an easy one :-)
Others have already answered most of it, but as it is asked from me here's my take :
As Mil said, Psion PDAs (series 3 and 5) actually were wildly successful, especially here in Europe, despite being very expensive. They still have a rabid fan base today, that will not use anything else. The Zaurus line, despite its age, is still very popular in Japan ; Sharp just couldn't be bothered to market it anywhere else. And Palm, of course, was top gun for a long time in its day.
Sorry to stick to this issue, but I disagree quite strongly on this. Let me start by saying that I love the Psion devices. The Psion 5 still does some things better than nearly any device out there in the market. I think it was a wildly successful device in many terms: engineering, design etc.

But I cannot really buy "wildly successful" in terms of popularity and sales. Nor to any other non-connected PDA device. Zaurus was discontinued some years ago. I don't believe it's a question of "not marketing". Truly great devices and services gain popularity with "zero marketing", and vice versa, no amount of marketing can help to really sell a non-useful device or service.

Quoting numbers from: http://www.ericlindsay.com/epoc/mhist.htm Be it 25000 Psions a month or 163000 devices year or whatever, that is nowhere near even moderately successful. By successful I mean mass market appeal. A device that the majority of people would seem worthwhile to buy. PDA's focusing on personal information management have never reached this target. Mobile phones are wildly successful.

However...

The real sense of your question, I guess, and a very relevant one, is "where are PDAs today" ? My opinion is that PDA have faltered as a market because they were very specialized devices - the mostly did one thing right, the PIM part. Multimedia was so-so, Net access too, etc.
But that doesn't mean PIM functions have suddenly become irrelevant, just that users want devices that do many things. The dominant PIM devices today are smartphones, who also do music, video, GPS nav and of course voice.
See what I'm getting to ? ITs are all the rage now, but if they stick to their "I'm just an IT" motto, they could end up where the PDAs are now, soon enough, when more multi-purpose devices catch up...
I do agree with this thing, however. I use PIM functions on my E61 phone, since it is my primary device. I use the PC suite to automatically sync with my Outlook calendar. Even if my tablet would have PIM functions, I simply wouldn't use them. Writing down the entries wouldn't be as comfortable or as fast as with my phone. I don't carry the tablet in my pocket all the time so that I could check my calendar or notes.

The IT currently isn't the primary device, it is a mobile companion device, next to my smartphone. I am not trying to say that PIM functions aren't useful in the right context and right device, but I don't really see the tablet currently being that right device. And once again, resources are not infinite.

Still, there are devices in the market that do only "one thing really well" - I guess you can name some of them - and they are wildly successful. If the PIM devices of yesteryear did PIM really well, and well, "nobody bought them", I at least think that tells something about having PIM on your non-primary device.