TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

PDA vs smartphone: History repeats…in reverse?

By Chris Meadows

It may just be that I’ve been following PDAs for a long time, but I see a certain amount of irony inherent in this ZDNet article about Motorola’s new Cliq Android-based smartphone. Or…is it a “smartphone”, after all? “Call these devices smartphones if you’d like,” the article’s author, Sam Diaz, says, “but increasingly, the phone part of the device is just another feature, another widget on the home page.”

Diaz explains that with the Cliq, the phone dialer is reduced to a little green button in one corner of the phone’s display—which is otherwise filled with other applications such as Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, etc. The interface is called “MotoBlur,” and features these applications as always-open “widgets” on a “homepage,” rather than apps that you tap on to launch as in the iPhone.

It is interesting to me that smartphones are suddenly dropping the emphasis on the “phone” part in favor of all the other things the device can do. It reminds me of what happened ten years ago, when the first primitive Handspring Treo integrated the telephone into the Personal Digital Assistant. Within a few years, PDAs had all but died out as the “smartphone” emerged to replace them.

Now the same thing is happening again, but in reverse: smartphones are getting more functions added to them, and the “phone” part is fading away into only one aspect of the overall communication and application device.

At the same time, Farhad Manjoo writes in Slate about the same kind of convergence approaching from a different direction. As the iPod Nano adds a video camera and an FM tuner, Manjoo writes, it heralds the end of the “dedicated music player.” Writes Manjoo:

The new Nano signals an inevitable, though still remarkable, transition: The iPod is dead. I don’t mean the name won’t stick around or that people will stop buying Apple’s devices. Rather, the sun is setting on what the iPod once was—a device you bought to play digital music.

He goes on to suggest that it won’t be long before the Nano, like the Touch, gains Internet access, a touchscreen, and so on.

Before long, the term “mp3 player” (and, for that matter, “e-book reader”—Manjoo also mentions Jobs’s remarks about the Kindle) may be just as outdated as Sam Diaz thinks “smartphone” is about to be.

Diaz writes:

And doesn’t it feel kind of silly to keep calling them smartphones when the phone itself is just another app these days – and not even the most-used one, at that. I thought about just calling them “handhelds,” as in “Has anyone seen my handheld?” but that didn’t work for me, either. We definitely need a better name for this category.

Any suggestions?

Might I suggest “Personal Digital Assistant,” or “PDA” for short?

Or, as Manjoo says, “The rest of us have another name for such a machine: a computer.”