Personal digital assistant: Encyclopedia II - Personal digital assistant - Overview

Personal digital assistant - Overview

Personal digital assistant - History

The term "personal digital assistant" was coined on January 7, 1992 by John Sculley at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, referring to the Apple Newton. Earlier devices like the Psion and Sharp Wizard already had the functionality to be considered PDAs, however. In fact, PDAs by other names were available as early as the mid-1970s -- first as very advanced calculators, then as electronic organizers, and later as palmtops. [1].

PDAs are some times refered to as "Palms" or "Palm Pilot" after an early PDA created by Palm, Inc. This usage is a case of genericized trademark, similar to refering to a tissue as a "Kleenex"; or a bandage as a "Band-Aid".

Personal digital assistant - OS

The currently major PDA operating systems are:

• Palm OS - owned by Palm, Inc.
• Windows Mobile (Pocket PC), (based on the Windows CE kernel) - owned by Microsoft
• BlackBerry - owned by Research In Motion
• Many operating systems based on the Linux kernel - free (not owned by any company) These include:
  • GPE - Based on GTK+/X11
  • OPIE/Qtopia - based on Qt/E Qtopia is developed by Trolltech, OPIE is a fork of Qtopia developed by volunteers
• Symbian OS (formerly EPOC) owned by Ericsson, Panasonic, Nokia, Samsung, Siemens and Sony Ericsson

Personal digital assistant - Architecture

Many PDAs run using a variation of the ARM architecture (usually denoted by the Intel XScale trademark). This encompasses a class of RISC microprocessors that are widely used in mobile devices and embedded systems, and its design was influenced strongly by a popular 1970s/1980s CPU, the MOS Technology 6502.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Overview", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki