4 ms·

Would there be a market for cheap, lightweight pdas with weeks of battery life today?

macintux 7y ago
I'm unconvinced that battery life is important for something you use all the time. Obviously it needs to last a day, but if you're frequently using it, charging it overnight isn't hard to remember. If you don't often use it, battery life is critical because it's unlikely you'll remember to charge it... but if you're not using your PDA regularly, it's probably not a very good PDA (for your needs, anyway). I think we all think we want long battery life. I just don't think in practice it matters.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  The weeks or months of battery life that my e-reader has is a game changer. It entirely changes how I think about maintenance of the device (ie. I don't).
  - macintux 7y ago
    True, but if it doesn't have power when you need it, what's the real impact? (Setting aside the inconvenience of, say, going on a flight and not having something to read.) If your PDA doesn't have power when you need a critical piece of information, that's a real problem.
- bigiain 7y ago
  There's an interesting difference (for me) between the recharge requirements for my phone, iPad, and Kindle. I charge my phone most nights (it'll last into the second evening pretty reliably on a charge), my iPad once a week or so, and my Kindle fairly rarely. I do quite appreciate the long battery like of the Kindle (it's an old 4th gen eInk display model, which doesn't go a whole month any more with heavy use, but even used a lot it still gets well over 2-3 weeks out of a charge). I sometimes consider investigating rooting/hacking a Kindle to make it closer to a PDA - I suspect it's got a lot more computing power than a Newton did...
KlaymenDK 7y ago
YES!!!1! At least, I would love it if there were. Personally, my favourite device was a Palm, my brother's was a Psion, but the basic idea is the same. How often do you hear people complain or worry about their battery level? All the time. How often do you hear people complain that their 5-inch screen isn't 4K Ultra Retina RGBA OLED goodness? The race to thinnest form factor has always confused me; what is really the use of having a razor in your pocket, rather than twice the mAh? The race to thinnest bezel has always confused me, too; what is really the use of a device you can't hardly touch without simultaneously operating it? I think it would be very, very welcome to have a device that did the "standard PDA thing" extremely well (unlike modern smartphone OS'es), had "just enough" features, and oodles of battery life. Just the fact that there are modern crowd-funded initiatives to make "something like the Psion Series 5" shows that there is indeed interest (if not enough to wake up Samsung and its ilk).

I'm unconvinced that battery life is important for something you use all the time. Obviously it needs to last a day, but if you're frequently using it, charging it overnight isn't hard to remember. If you don't often use it, battery life is critical because it's unlikely you'll remember to charge it... but if you're not using your PDA regularly, it's probably not a very good PDA (for your needs, anyway). I think we all think we want long battery life. I just don't think in practice it matters.

Waterluvian 7y ago
The weeks or months of battery life that my e-reader has is a game changer. It entirely changes how I think about maintenance of the device (ie. I don't).
- macintux 7y ago
  True, but if it doesn't have power when you need it, what's the real impact? (Setting aside the inconvenience of, say, going on a flight and not having something to read.) If your PDA doesn't have power when you need a critical piece of information, that's a real problem.
bigiain 7y ago
There's an interesting difference (for me) between the recharge requirements for my phone, iPad, and Kindle. I charge my phone most nights (it'll last into the second evening pretty reliably on a charge), my iPad once a week or so, and my Kindle fairly rarely. I do quite appreciate the long battery like of the Kindle (it's an old 4th gen eInk display model, which doesn't go a whole month any more with heavy use, but even used a lot it still gets well over 2-3 weeks out of a charge). I sometimes consider investigating rooting/hacking a Kindle to make it closer to a PDA - I suspect it's got a lot more computing power than a Newton did...

KlaymenDK 7y ago

YES!!!1! At least, I would love it if there were. Personally, my favourite device was a Palm, my brother's was a Psion, but the basic idea is the same. How often do you hear people complain or worry about their battery level? All the time. How often do you hear people complain that their 5-inch screen isn't 4K Ultra Retina RGBA OLED goodness? The race to thinnest form factor has always confused me; what is really the use of having a razor in your pocket, rather than twice the mAh? The race to thinnest bezel has always confused me, too; what is really the use of a device you can't hardly touch without simultaneously operating it? I think it would be very, very welcome to have a device that did the "standard PDA thing" extremely well (unlike modern smartphone OS'es), had "just enough" features, and oodles of battery life. Just the fact that there are modern crowd-funded initiatives to make "something like the Psion Series 5" shows that there is indeed interest (if not enough to wake up Samsung and its ilk).