PDA Review

PDA or smartphone?

As standalone PDAs (personal digital assistants) continue to be overtaken by smartphones, the reviews of these products are getting tougher to find. Although we did find some good PDA reviews, led by those written by the editors at CNet.com and PCMag.com, many of the previously existing reviews are now lumped together with smartphone reviews or missing altogether.

CNet.com and PC Magazine both use established benchmarks to measure performance and speed. Battery-drain tests and feature analyses are another important part of the review process. MobileTechReview.com also does an impressive job and includes detailed benchmark test results for Windows-based PDAs. Consumer Reports magazine has not revisited the topic of PDAs in quite some time, but their 2007 update contains many still-available models.

Sales of traditional PDAs continue their steep decline, and many companies, such as Dell, no longer make them at all.

The market is now dominated by just two companies, Palm and Hewlett-Packard. Together, they produce only a handful of standalone PDA models. Palm hasn't introduced a new PDA in more than two years. HP, however, has a pair of newer PDAs: the sturdy iPAQ 110/111 (Est. $265) and the high-end iPAQ 210/211 (*est. $395). Both new iPAQs boast faster processors, more memory, bigger screens and richer resolution than the older Palm PDAs. Although the few experts who still review standalone PDAs heap praise on the new HP PDAs, we didn't find any reviews that compare the older, highly rated Palm PDAs with the newer iPAQs.

IDC analysts blame the sharply rising demand for smartphones -- essentially PDA/cell-phone combo devices -- for the PDA's rapid demise. According to critics, including blunt commentary by reviewers in Our Sources, more people are looking for a single convergence device to handle phone calls, e-mail and mobile-office functions, rather than carrying both a PDA and a phone. Palm and HP have focused much of their resources to developing smartphones as well. Our report on smartphones covers these devices, including Blackberries, Palm's Treo line and the Apple iPhone, among others.

There are still reasons you might consider a standard PDA without cell phone capabilities. Smartphones are bulky compared to a regular cell phone, yet their screens are usually not as large as those of regular PDAs. That makes a PDA generally better than a smartphone for working with spreadsheets, viewing web pages or displaying photos and video. PDAs have also made advances in usability to compete with the growing popularity of smartphones, adding more memory, faster processors and greater multimedia functionality. If you don't need Internet connectivity, a PDA is a much better value than a smartphone. Most smartphones also require a one- or two-year contract and monthly fees with a mobile phone service provider.

Macintosh users should be aware that only Palm PDAs will work with Apple computers. HP's PDAs use a Windows Mobile platform that is not compatible with Macintosh systems. You can, however, purchase third-party software that will let you sync a Windows-based PDA with a Mac.