In today’s NY Times, John Markoff speculates that Apple might be planning to introduce an “iPhone”: Apple’s Chief in the Risky Land of the Handhelds. The only thing I’m sure about an Apple portable device is that it’s not going to be the iWalk.
We decided that between now and next year, the P.D.A. is going to be subsumed by the telephone,” [Jobs] said last week in an interview. “We think the P.D.A. is going away.”
In the PDA Market Report, I wrote something to the effect of “the defining feature of the next generation of PDA’s will be that they are simply called ‘phones.'” Unfortunately, we are still a technology generation or two away from really good products, but closing the gap. Phones or music players that can sync with computers can replace the contact and calendar applications of PDAs. Convergent communicators like the Treo or Hiptop are getting closer to being convenient and inexpensive enough to be widely adopted. There is still room for a more elegant iPod-like phone, but can that be affordable now?
