Newton Poetry

Blake Patterson of Touch Arcade and Byte Cellar (check out my interview with Blake) shared his PDA collection over at Flickr.

It’s pretty impressive, what with the Newtons, Compaq iPaq, Sony MagicLink (with Magic Cap OS), and Philips Nino prototype. The retrospective just shows how far we’ve come – from pen-based B&W screens to today’s magic pixie dust.

[Photo courtesy of Blake’s Flickr album under the Creative Commons, heads-up courtesy of Blake himself.]

What’s up with the personal digital assistant (PDA) these days?

Says one blogger, they may be obsolete already.

Over at Charlie’s Diary, author Charlie Stross says even his HP iPAQ is on its last legs in terms of usefulness:

Yet despite delivering the initial promise of the Newton — yes, you can scribble anywhere on the screen and it will decode your notes; yes, it does the agenda and contacts and notepad stuff well; it also takes voice memos; it’s got a decent word processor and spreadsheet on board; it’s a desert topping and a floor wax — it’s fundamentally obsolete.

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.

Kind of like what the iPhone offers, right?

Now that most smart phones, the iPhone included, come with contact and appointment applications, is there a need for a dedicated machine to handle day-to-day business tasks? The numbers seem to say “no,” and the popularity of the iPhone and RIM’s own BlackBerry back that up. Even as far back as 2006, the outlook for PDAs looked grim.

Shucks, even my 30 GB iPod video comes with some of the functionality, at least in terms of reference data, of a PDA. What do you think? Is the PDA idea extinct?