See also: PDA (homonymy)

A personal assistant or palm computer is a portable digital device, often called by its English initials PDA for Personal DIGITAL Assisting . The first public use of this term goes back to January 7th, 1992 at the time of Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (Nevada) where John Sculley (then chairman of Apple) presented the Newton. According to the definition that one gives them, the first PDA (which thus did not bear yet the name from there) are Wizard OZ-7000 of Sharp, the Portfolio of Atari (1989), Refalo of Kyocera (1990) or Series 3 of Psion (1991).

Material characteristics

It is about a case of the size of a Calculatrice, which holds in the hand, sheltering an architecture data-processing and equipped with a touchscreen and sometimes with a built-in keyboard with small keys. A Stylet is often associated with the touchscreen.

The PDA is used mainly for its functions of Agenda, telephone Répertoire and scratch pad, but technological advances made it possible to associate functionalities to him multi-media, such as the Dictaphone, the reader of mp3, images, video, and sometimes the telephone (with a chip GSM or GPRS integrated).

A stylet makes it possible to write directly on the screen of the PDA there to record or extract from information, to the means either of a written language simplified (with each character corresponds a particular movement of the stylet), or of an emulated keyboard.

The built-in memory (in general several megabytes) of certain PDA can be increased considerably by associating to him an external storage in the form of a Memory card which one plugs in the PDA (according to the formats, the memory cards can store between 16 Mo and 4 Go).

Software characteristics

Whatever the mark of the PDA, the thousands of free software or paying are available on Internet and can be there installed within the limit of the memory of PDA (scientific computers, databases, plays, managers of bank accounts, etc).

Most widespread operating systems:

• Palm OS published by the company PalmSource;
• Pocket PC also called Windows Mobile , like Windows CE, published by Microsoft.

Arrived more recently on the market:

• Personal assistants equipped with Linux and Qtopia, in particular the Zaurus Linux of Sharp.

Market shares by OS in the 3rd quarter 2004:

recent evolutions

The extension of technical capabilities made it possible the PDA to become communicating: beyond the connections Infra-red of origin, the PDA embark connections WiFi or Bluetooth, and can make function of Mobile phone. They are then in frontal competition with the mobile telephones which in same time also increased their technical capabilities and functional calculuses until being usually called smartphones (intelligent telephones).

The PDA have a larger screen, but are of this fact slightly less less handy than the smartphones. Those on the other hand are handicapped in their low capacity of writing. For the remainder, the various operating systems propose comparable functionalities, performances and compatibilities.

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