Summary
Long before smartphones, people were slipping computers in their pockets in the form of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). 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.
The Dawn of the PDA Era
Before the era of the touchscreen we call smartphones, there were these humble devices that you could easily palm—pun intended. Introduced in the ’90s, PDAs were the go-to gadgets for busy professionals who wanted to jot down notes, manage their calendar, and even access their emails without having to lug around a laptop. The most infamous was perhaps Apple’s 1993NewtonMessagePad which coined the term “PDA”, and in some ways could be considered the distant ancestor of both the iPhone and iPad. The Newton wasn’t a runaway success by any measure, but it was a very nifty concept device that foreshadowed the future of smartphones and tablet computing alike.
My journey with PDAs started way before they became an archival memory. In eighth grade, I got my hands on a used Palm IIIe. The device was manufactured by the now defunct Palm Computing company, the nearly ubiquitous face of the PDA era.
That little piece of tech made me feel like a Star Trek character, though to everyone else, it probably just made me look like a nerd. We’re talking greyscale screen,passive stylus inputs, and a connectivity suite that now seems like it came straight out of the Flintstones. Yet, for its time, it was revolutionary.
The Palm III: My Swiss Army Knife
While others in my high school were still using paper notebooks and floppy disks, here I was with this little digital marvel. I used it for taking notes, setting reminders, and, yes, even for reading books.Dial-up internetwas the gateway to my Palm’s ever-expanding library of primitive eBooks in the form of bootleg .txt files. I had always lugged several books to school to read in my free time, but since I got my first PDA, it just wasn’t necessary anymore, and I’ve only had fleeting dalliance with paper books in the decades since.
While my Palm was a primitive device with barely any computational power—a scant 16Mhz and 2MB of RAM—having this little computer with me at all times showed me how useful the concept was long before virtually everyone in the world would get their own glossy pocket supercomputers.
The HP iPaq H2200: The ‘Almost’ Smartphone
The early Palm Pilots were neat, and I loved mine. But then something new came along, a device that would really set the stage for what was to come: the HP iPaq H2200. This little guy had a color screen and expanded functionality that blew my previous Palm device out of the water. No longer was I restricted to just the basics. Now, my digital experience had color, music, and even some rudimentary gaming.
Believe it or not, I even figured out a way to access the internet on it. At school, with the help of my dad’s hand-me-down Nokia 6300i, I accessed the internet using the iPaq’s IR port and some USSD “feature” code trickery. I was basically living the smartphone dream before “smartphone” was even a term in our collective lexicon. Oh, and let’s not forget about playing a pretty decent port of Quake 1 during my English class using the stylus to aim. We take it all for granted now, but back then novelty of the experience was off the charts.
Beyond My Pocket: The Larger Picture
I’ve spent a chunk of time so far talking about my personal history with PDAs to provide some hands-on context for the history of the PDA. But what I experienced was just a small microcosm of a much larger evolution that was happening. Companies like Palm, HP, and Microsoft, with its Pocket PC, were pushing the boundaries of what could fit in your pocket. You could see the future embedded in these devices, a future that would later evolve into the first iPhone and eventually the cutting-edge smartphones we can’t live without today.
PDAs didn’t gain mass-market adoption like today’s smartphones. When you pulled one out, people looked at it strangely, unless you were among your equally geeky peers. 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. For those of us who got a taste of that future, it was an unforgettable experience that framed our expectations for the technology that followed. 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.
And I certainly understand how we moved from the low adoption rate of the PDA (and people scoffing at the idea of it replacing anything more than an address book) to a world where the computers we slip in our pockets are so versatile and powerful some people don’t even feel the need to keep a laptop around.
From PDA to Smartphone to Where?
So, here we are, in an era where smartphones have become an essential extension of our lives. But for me, and possibly for many others who grew up in the ’90s and early 2000s, the PDA was the first taste of a digital life away from a desk and a bulky computer. Those days of fiddling with my Palm IIIe and HP iPaq may be long gone, but the sense of limitless possibilities they instilled in me still remains, echoing in every swipe and tap on my modern-day smartphone.
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.
