A PDA By Any Other Name: The Shrewdest Marketing Decision Ever?

Mobile phones (or cell phones, for you Americans) have changed a lot since my first one. I remember as a teenager being thrilled when I got my hands on a brand new Nokia 3310. Changeable covers, programmable MIDI ringtones, cheap, tough, simple.

I remember around about that time there were "PDAs" on the market. Personal Digital Assistant. Calendar, contacts, notes, organisation, maybe some basic web browsing. Palm Pilots, Pocket PCs, styluses, etc. So...whatever happened to PDAs? How did they decline, and why?

Well, the marketeers selling these products had a brain wave. "Everyone has a mobile phone of sorts, and buys a new one every year or two. PDAs aren't selling as well as we'd like. Why not keep selling them, but call them 'mobile phones'?"

That's right. It was all in the name. You bought a PDA because you needed a new phone. It's not a phone. It's a computer that lives in your pocket. Chances are you already have at least one computer at home. Now you have two.

The old Nokias, that do phone calls/texts/not much else are the true mobile phones and they pretty much peaked in terms of delivering that functionality. What you have in your pocket right now is only a phone by name - sure it does phone calls, but that's a tiny subset of things that it can do.

If I sold you a car, and I called it "a three piece suite", then it's technically true. You have two armchairs in the front and a sofa in the back. It's a three piece suite. Everyone needs a three piece suite, right? Therefore: you need a car.

If they'd called them "Pocket Computers", nobody would've bothered. Call them "Mobile Phones", and it was a natural continuation of an already established market.

Welcome to the slow manipulation of the public consciousness and possibly the shrewdest marketing direction conceived in modern civilisation.