notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

Charlie Stross on the life and death of the PDA. Usually I’d post this on delicious, but there’s a lot I want to quote.

Newton was John Sculley’s pet project, allegedly started after a high-level Apple meeting in which he realized everyone present was using a Cambridge Z88, and said “why don’t we make one of those?”

The sorry truth is, PDAs are a commercial rat-hole. The only folks who really made money at them were Psion (hors de combat) and Palm (whose abject failure to modernize their OS since 2001 amounts to the longest drawn-out suicide in portable computing history

It turns out that people don’t want that stuff in a notepad-shaped machine. What they want is a mobile phone that does the address book/agenda stuff — and is an entertainment gadget besides, with a camera and music player built in.

Folks who use computers and want a mobile device want a real computer that has shrunk in the wash, not some bizarre tablet thingy that forces them to write with a pen. Sculley’s 1989 executives might not have known how to use a keyboard, but it’s 2009 now, and only luddites and geriatrics have failed to come to terms with QWERTY over the intervening two decades.

I’m now looking at my desktop. There are two devices on it: the powerful, grown-up iPaq with a decade of software development behind it, and the new upstart iPhone. And I know where the future lies.