Well, it was not impossible, but it was limited by screen size and the notion that PDAs are desktop-tethered devices.

In the long run, conduits killed them. The amount of lost addresses and missed meetings PDAs created thanks to time gaps and concurrency losses caused by their dependency on conduit-syncing to groupware clients on end user PCs pushed them out of what was supposed to be their core field. Over the past years, the number of companies giving out free PDAs has dwindled (if any, they still hand out Blackberries - which would best be classified as intermediate devices), many companies have restricted or dropped sync access, and even more users switched back to or un-synced PDA use or paper-based organizers on their own.

That PDAs are clumsy at direct internet access merely put a stop to all attempts to rescue them by redefining them as a web-based address and calendar access device. But the reason for their demise is worse than that, the fundamental paradigm of a viewer for desktop data is flawed, and was merely a workaround back when only a fraction of office and home users had realtime data access.

Sevo