Smartphones outsell PDAs: "PDAs and handheld device sales slumped by 13% in 2004 to under 10m units, while smartphone sales jumped by 101% to reach 17.5 million, nearly 80% more than handhelds."

Whilst I'm a total believer that phones are where it's at and PDAs are a niche product, the lines between the two are so blurred that I don't see how it's possible to compare the two as product categories in such a financially specific way

And surely while functions which we used to see as the job of a PDA (address book, calendaring, browser, games, installable applications) move into phones and our expectations of what a smartphone *is* increase, it's only natural that we'll see phone sales expand at the expense of PDAs...

The other day Mr Jones pointed out something which hadn't occurred to me: that the very name "smartphone" says a lot about who the target market for these devices has historically been. And if your phone is "smart", then does that make other phones "dumb"? And what does expressing myself through owning a "dumb" device say about me?