Entrepreneurship

Best Buy drops PDAs

By Johnny Fuery ⋅ June 13, 2006 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

The standalone PDA died for me a long time ago. It looks like the marketplace is starting to reflect that.

(Although I’m admittedly one of those weirdos that actually got rid of my blackberry on purpose. Push email is so a recipe for working too much. And I work far too much as it is.)

From Barnako.com: “If Best Buy has taken them off the floor, no one at headquarters will be surprised that sales this quarter will be down, and so on, and so on. Sure, the Web site still sells them. But my retail antennae are telling me it’s over for any handheld that is not a phone and a music player and tricked out with lots of memory.”

There’s still a solid B2B market for them — companies like the one I work for can milk that for another few years. But someday soon, I believe, the mid-size form factor between Treo and Tablet will permanently die.

…which probably means there’s a market for a tablet/phone/wi-fi bundle. Maybe even including the typical $300 subsidy from the wireless carriers. There’d have to be software on the thing to seamlessly switch connections on and off, as well — it should be user customizable, since sometimes battery conservation is paramount, sometimes speed is #1, and sometimes it’s a matter of using the cheapest per-minute pipe. It would also be nice if a user could add subscription info from the major wi-fi networks.

And while I’m dreaming, some sort of trickle-sync (hmmm, where have I heard that term before?) technology that could cache frequently-accessed network content whenever a high-bandwidth connection appeared would rock. This should be both dynamic (i.e., the 20 most requested resources, web or otherwise, in the last week) and channel (i.e., pre-defined) based.

Maybe I should get into product management.