Brighthand's Ed Hardy tells us his thoughts regarding the direction the PDA appears to be going now, and what this might mean for those who want to stick to old-style PDAs a la Palm's lower-end offerings.

In a nutshell, he says that given how things are now, those who want to purchase a PDA may well have to start looking at UMPCs (Ultra Mobile PCs) in the near future, as every manufacturer is shifting away from making PDAs in order to focus on smartphones.

Much as we hate to, we'd have to agree with Hardy.  Even though Palm's Tungsten E2 has been selling well, it's the Treos that've been Palm's star performers for months now, not the E2 - or, for that matter, any of Palm's other PDAs.  And this is something that's been the case at quite a lot of other companies as well.  It's smartphones that resonate with people now, not PDAs. 

Maybe this has to do with the fact that users get more features with smartphones vis-a-vis PDAs, and would thus prefer the added convenience of owning one device instead of two (plus we're certain that the fact that smartphones are optimized for one-hand operation, while PDAs are as a rule stylus-operated, has something to do with that).  We're not sure.  But one thing's certain:  high-end smartphones have outcompeted equivalent PDAs, and once mid-range smartphones are out they'll do the same to the PDAs in their range. 

We don't see the PDA as we know it dying, though.  In a few short years' time whatever few PDAs will exist will without exception be the cellar-dwellers of their companies' product ranges and will have the feature sets to match.  There will always be a market for that sort of product, but it won't be a high-end one any longer - far from it.

[Via Brighthand.com]