Never heard of these impressive little precursors to the smartphone?
Well, now’s the perfect time to learn about this interesting little bit of mobile tech history.
My journey with PDAs started way before they became an archival memory.
In eighth grade, I got my hands on a used Palm IIIe.
Yet, for its time, it was revolutionary.
No longer was I restricted to just the basics.
Corbin Davenport / How-To Geek
Now, my digital experience had color, music, and even some rudimentary gaming.
Believe it or not, I even figured out a way to enter the internet on it.
I was basically living the smartphone dream before “smartphone” was even a term in our collective lexicon.
MrLion626, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
We take it all for granted now, but back then novelty of the experience was off the charts.
But what I experienced was just a small microcosm of a much larger evolution that was happening.
PDAs didn’t gain mass-market adoption like today’s smartphones.
HP
You synced data with cradles and cables, instead of seamless cloud-based communication.
There was no way on earth anybody was replacing a full-fledged PC experience with a PDA.
But they were innovative and trend-setting.
They were an early taste of what was to come.
They taught us how to appreciate the value of having digital functionalities right at our fingertips.
PDAs are why I’m such a fan of portable technology.
I mayprefer a laptopto a desktop but I like to have the fastest flagship phones.
From PDA to Smartphone to Where?
So, here we are, in an era where smartphones have become an essential extension of our lives.
While smartphones seem ubiquitous today, I do wonder what their successor will be.
Will it be amixed-realitydevice like theApple Vision Pro?
Will computing power move out of our pockets and fully into the cloud?
Or will our pocket computers stay more or less the same shape, but just get faster and faster?
I don’t know about you, but I’m incredibly excited to find out.
