Jan
10
2007iPhone and the end of the PDA
10
2007
By now, you’ve all heard of Apple’s new iPhone. If you haven’t seen the demos of the user interface, do so NOW. As excited as I am whenever Apple launches stuff like this, it pains me that they are literally the only company on the planet putting this much innovation into computing devices. There is room in the market for another Apple, yet everyone else continues to rearrange cheap, poorly designed commodity parts into marginally interesting devices and calls that innovation.
Anyway, one interesting aspect of this launch that I don’t think many people have picked up on is this: By creating what is possibly the world’s most powerful PDA, but simply calling it a “phone”, they’ve stuck the first nail in the coffin for the entire non-phone PDA concept, which will likely go the way of the 5 dollar pocket calculator very soon now.