Are Digital Personal Assistant (PDA) Losing Their Appeal?

Since the emergence of smart phones, the PDAs or the personal digital assistant also commonly referred to as the palm top computer are growing less popular. But this hardly means that nobody ever buys the PDAs because there are still quite a number of people who appreciate their organizing capabilities and prefer to use them for official as well as personal use.

If you are wondering like so many others what exactly is the difference between PDAs and smart phones and why some people prefer the PDA over smart phones, I suggest that you read on and you will be able to understand the reasons.

First of all, you need to understand that a smart phone is a combination device that combines the organizing abilities of PDAs and the communication capability of a cell phone. Both have their pros and cons depending on the kind of usage that you might have. PDAs are basically very cost effective.

Most of them are cheaper to purchase than a smart phone and if you were to look at the long run, you will find that smart phones cost more on a monthly basis thanks to the greater amounts that you end up paying the mobile carriers. If you have opted for WIFI services in addition to texting and voice facilities, then you would be paying even more on a monthly basis.

The biggest advantage that smart phones have over the PDAs is that as long as the mobile signals are available, you can go online and transfer data without much of a problem. As long as you get good cellular signals, you can go online anywhere and at anytime.

PDAs cannot connect to mobile carriers and so their connectivity to the internet gets limited.

Since a smart phone is basically a PDA combined with a cell phone, there may be a few problems in functionality. For instance, most smart phones have a much smaller screen when compared to a PDA and so it becomes that much more difficult to read documents, online fax messages and spreadsheets using a smart phone.

You will have to scroll upwards, downwards and sideways many times before you can get through a document. This can be quite annoying if you have to do it several times a day, whereas with a PDA, you will never face such problems. Then again, there is the safety aspect if you have just one device.

If you are using the smart phone for everything and you happen to lose it, you will lose all your documents as well as contacts. But if you have a cell phone and a PDA and lose one, there will not be such a great loss.