Smart Phones Appear to be the Gadget of Choice

I recently read that Sony is dropping their PDA line completely. The article is here. Worldwide PDA sales have dropped for the 3rd year in a row to a figure below 10 million units. Smart Phones now appear to be the gadget of choice. The range of offerings include not only the PDA functionality such as address book and To-do lists, but also video, and more. The camera on the original mobile phones appeared to be toys which attracted primarily the teen market but now sophisticated imaging tools are coming to the mobile phone. To see an example click here.

Microsoft announced recently a framework for providing an abstraction layer that allows one to use the mobile phone to connect to various ERP systems. This will allow additional web services capabilities. The announcement is somewhat cryptic but it does open the way for more sophisticated web-based applications to run over the mobile phone network.

What does that mean for Virtual Instrumentation? It means a wider range of choices. Not only does the mobile phone take over the PDA functionality, it also brings additional capabilities in communications, web services, vision, and audio, to name a few.

If you see possibilities in using the next generation smart phone in your application, please contact me at hall.martin@ni.com.

Best regards,
Hall T. Martin