A decade of PDAs and smartphones: 2003-2005

2003

The year 2003 saw a continuance of the bulk release schedule of PDAs which has started to trend upwards in 2002. It also marked the time when connected PDAs would start to infiltrate the previously offline world of mobile organisers and some notable releases gave birth to the smartphones we know and love today.

The Handspring Treo 600 was not a huge success, but would ultimately pave the way for the all conquering Palm Treo 650 which brought the word ‘smartphone’ to the masses. Sony continued to release offline PDAs such as the NZ90, TG50, SJ22, NX80, NX73, UX40 and UX50, TJ25 and TJ35, but not one made any impact on a market which was now seen as the potential darling of the computer industry. The birth of Sony Ericsson eventually saw off Sony’s interest in the mobile market and despite huge potential it had a narrow view which stopped it from reaching the place it should have. Sony could have dominated the early smartphone market, but threw its money in the wrong direction and failed to show the corporate imagination it put into the design of its PDAs.

Palm released the Tungsten W which could be argued to be its first smartphone, but the need for a wired headset to talk to other people did not fit in a world where mobile phones were still seen as embarrassing by far too many people. Palm also followed up the release of the Tungsten T2 with the gazillion selling Tungsten T3. I remember attending a PDA meet organised by Steve Litchfield and almost everyone there had a Tungsten T3. It captured the imagination of the PDA buying public and for those of us who thought that smartphones would never catch on; this seemed to be the perfect tool to work with our standalone mobile phones at the time.

The bewildering number of Windows Mobile 2003 (notice the change of OS) devices only increased the confusion in the market, but it was starting to take a foothold and these PDAs were now more commonplace than ever before. Many had integrated phones, such as the OS XDA II, and this was the first OS to truly grab the smartphone philosophy and bring more complex mobile phones to the market. HTC was the driving force behind many of the Windows Mobile phones, but always made phones branded under different names including O2, QTEK and the like.

Who could forget the Nokia N-Gage? Well, everyone apparently. It was a huge disappointment and within months it would be on sell for sell than £50 without a contract. Yet again, a tale of too early to market before the consumers caught up. At least Nokia were not put off and released the N-Gage platform years later to better success. Hold on, that one failed as well didn’t it. Sony Ericsson popped up with the UIQ driven P800 which was a surprise hit- you would see them being used everywhere and once again proved that the big names in the PDA industry are not always best placed to be big in the world of phones.

RIM continued to evolve slowly and the BlackBerry 7730 gave a hint of what we see today; colour screen, front mounted QWERTY keyboard and PIM applications which really worked. At this point though, RIM was still woefully behind the rest in terms of phone practicality.

Most significant device of 2003: Sony Ericsson P800

2004

The Palm Treo 650 dominated 2004 and was the first smartphone to reach a mass audience. It was hugely popular in the US and I remember well walking around Disneyworld and seeing nothing but Treo’s a couple of years later. It had a superb battery life, a high resolution screen and was only hampered by a lack of dbCache which caused it to crash if you so much as breathed on it. Palm persevered with the PDA market as well and introduced its Zire range and the Tungsten T5 which was supposed to be an upgrade of the Tungsten T3. It was, in my experience, the most unreliable PDA ever made and I hated almost everything about it. Palm didn’t care though because the Treo 650 was a huge success which only failed to catch on in Europe when its GSM variant was released a few months later in 2005.

HP had a Sony moment and after devouring Compaq released a succession of PDAs under the iPAQ moniker that included specifications not previously dreamed about in a pocket device. Despite the familiarity of the iPAQ name, Fujitsu-Siemens quietly released the Loox 720 which many, including me, would still quite happily use today. It had two expansion slots built in (Compact Flash and SD) plus a 1.3 Megapixel camera which was truly terrible and a lightning fast 520Mhz processer powering the glorious 3.6” 480 x 640 VGA screen. It was simply superb and a power users dream, but like most non-connected PDAs it did not connect with the wider world. Windows Mobile smartphones were now more commonplace and the T-Mobile MDA III (a variant of the O2 XDA) showed that there was a place for the smartphone with the network carriers.

RIM continued to develop one step behind the competition, but curiously continued to amass subscribers every month throughout the year and devices like the 7100v, 7290 and 7780 showed a slight leaning to more than the business market.

Nokia released the 7710 which was a curiosity in almost every way, but one which made very few people curious enough to actually buy it. The 6620, 6630 and N-Gage QD showed that Nokia had still not worked out the smartphone market yet, but its time was just around the corner.

Most significant device of 2004: Palm Treo 650

2005

This is the year when PDAs started to die out and the smartphone would come of age. The O2 XDA range was becoming widely used in business and even consumer circles and it seemed as though the Windows Mobile bandwagon was picking up too much pace to be caught. Windows Mobile 5.0 was a much improved OS and with it came a slew of devices from HP, Asus, Qtek, O2, Orange, Acer, i-mate and many others brands which were often a mask for the sleeping giant that was HTC.

Palm released the LifeDrive which continues to prove the mobile theory that timing is everything. In theory it would stand up today and bears some similarities to the iPod Touch, but it failed to catch on in a big way. Besides the ever popular Treo 650, the TX and Z22 felt like sympathetic nods to the bygone PDA age which was on its last legs. The Z21 and Z22 did have some success though and were often seen for sale in supermarkets, but just as in the previous 1 years PDAs were never destined to become household items.

RIM was now starting to become a familiar name, or rather BlackBerry was, and the 8700 was a small leap towards future domination. It seems as though RIM was the only company who understood where the mobile market was heading and the rest just jumped up like an over excited dog time and time at the prospect of some easy cash, and completely forgot to build a plan behind their success.

There is little doubt that Nokia was still very much a mobile phone manufacture who wanted to keep devices like the Communicator (now up to 9300) firmly in its box, but the N90 showed that there was much potential under the Symbian platform. Little did we know what was to come and how bizarre the release schedule of some of these companies would become over the next few years.

Most significant device of 2005: i-mate K-JAM

Related articles: A decade of PDAs and smartphones: 2000-2002