The History of the Personal Digital Assistant
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 term PDA was first used by Apple to describe their new digital organiser, the Newton, in 1992. The marketing hype described it as The Computer of the Future, which in some ways it was, as it did away with the keyboard to make way for a large touch sensitive screen and a small plastic stylus.
It was not, however, a genuinely useful item in itself, as the handwriting recognition software didn't quite work, and without anything else to input data with, they were consigned to the dustbin of history almost as soon as they were released. There were several other attempts at a stylus-based personal organiser throughout the nineties, but the most successful of these, the Palm Pilot, did away with the pretence of being able to read human handwriting, using a system of strokes to designate different characters that had to be learned by the user.
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.
A modern PDA usually features a touch sensitive screen with a detachable stylus or a small QWERTY keyboard for data entry, a memory card slot for data storage, and wireless connectivity via Bluetooth, IrDA and/or WiFi. The inbuilt software usually includes an address book, to do list, diary, notepad, email and a web browser.
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 come a long way in less than thirty years, from a glorified pocket calculator to a full blown PC in the palm of your hand. At this rate, who knows what your PDA will be able to do for you in thirty years time.