Difference Between PDA and Smartphone

PDA vs Smartphone

Personal Digital Assistant or more commonly known as PDAs sprouted from the need to have an organized schedule and contact list. Prior to the PDA, businessmen used organizers, which are little notebooks with specific dates to write your appointments and an alphabetical section where you can write your contacts. PDAs does all this while adding search functionalities at the very minimum. A smartphone is simply a merger between a mobile phone and a PDA.

The improvements in mobile phone technology made it a good substitute for PDAs. An address book and a calendar where you can set alarms for your appointments become very common in mobile phones, but the features of a PDA also improved that the features incorporated into mobile phones became inadequate.

Nowadays, in order to be truly considered as a smartphone, the device must have the basic contact manager and calendar along with a few more features. The first is the ability to synchronize to a computer. Second is full support for email, which has become totally indispensable for most businessmen. Third is connectivity options like WiFi, bluetooth, and infrared for transmitting data. Bluetooth and infrared have been pretty common in mobile phones, but WiFi is a more recent addition. Though not really essential to be considered as a smartphone, it is common to see touch screen displays and full QWERTY keyboards because they make it easy to for the user to enter data.

It is also essential for PDAs, and consequently smartphones, to be able to run third party programs to complement the native programs on the platform. Applications like cash organizers and even games have become an integral parts of PDAs and smartphones for different reasons.

It is now rare to see ‘PDA only’ devices since the price difference between PDAs and smartphones is no longer significant. If you have a PDA, you also probably have a mobile phone, it therefore makes sense to combine these two devices together.

Summary:
1. PDAs are used to simplify schedules, contacts, and note taking
2. Smartphones can do all this while adding a mobile phone’s features
3. Smartphones should be able to sync to a computer, support email, and have connectivity options
4. Smartphones usually have a touch screen for easy access and a full QWERTY keyboard
5. Smartphones need to support third party programs
6. Smartphones have begun to replace PDAs because of the integration of mobile phone technol

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