A history of the PDA

In a nutshell, a camera phone is a mobile phone with an integral digital camera. It allows users to capture both still images and short moving sequences, store them on the phones internal memory or a removable memory card, and share them with other devices and users via a wireless internet connection.

The daddy of them all was the Casio PF3000, a digital personal organiser that could do everything your Filofax could do, but without all the tatty bits of paper. Though it might have looked like a glorified pocket calculator, it was really quite powerful for its time and sold well upon its launch in 1983. Other firms, such as Psion and GO, followed suit and by the start of the nineties, the market was awash with digital organisers, signalling the end of the line for the paper based organiser.

The first company to use the name of Personal Digital Assistant(PDA) to describe these devices was Apple, who coined the term to promote their revolutionary new palmtop computer, called the Newton, in 1992. The most revolutionary thing about the Newton was that there was no keypad. Instead, the Newton came with a touch sensitive screen that you used in conjunction with a small plastic stylus, which could be used like a mouse or like a pen, with handwriting recognition software to turn your scribblings into data.

The public were initially blown away by the concept, but in practice, the machine was a good deal less useful than it seemed in the demonstrations. The handwriting recognition was not in the slightest bit reliable, and with no alternate input device, this made the machine less than useless for most of the people who bought it. More PDAs arrived with a similar concept as the decade wore on, the most successful of which was the Palm Pilot, which used a system of designated strokes to represent letters rather than claiming to be able to read handwriting.

The first combined PDA and mobile phone, the Nokia 9000 Communicator, was launched in 1996, and went on to become the biggest selling PDA ever made, although modern equivalents such as the Nokia N series and the RIM Blackberry are fast catching up.

Most modern PDAs feature a combination of input devices, including touch sensitive screens, tracker balls, and small QWERTY keyboards. Other common features include a memory card slot, the ability to connect wirelessly to the internet and to other PDAs via technologies such as Bluetooth and WiFi, and the ability to download software applications to increase the functionality of the machine.

One of the most important functions of a PDA is that you can connect to a PC and share the data between them, a technique known as synchronisation. This means that you can export all of your contact details, messages, and diary entries from your PC to your PDA, and vice versa, at the touch of a button. Not only does this mean that you don’t have to enter any of the same information twice, but it also means that your valuable data is backed up, in case one or other device is lost or ceases to function.

The PDA has gone from being a simple pocket organiser to being a full blown wireless communications device with more computing power than a space shuttle in the space of less than thirty years. At the current rate of advancement, the mind boggles as to what form the PDA will take in the future!

About the Author:
Vodafone offer a huge range of phones and price plans. If you like smart phones, you will love the Samsung Jet with its fast internet for express browsing and downloads.