A personal digital assistant (PDA), also known as a handheld PC, is a variety mobile device which functions as a personal information manager. PDAs have been mostly displaced by the widespread adoption of highly capable smartphones, in particular those based on iOS and Android, seeing a rapid decline in use after 2007.
Palm OS was a mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants (PDAs) in 1996. Palm OS was designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. It is provided with a suite of basic applications for personal information management. Later versions of the OS have been extended to support smartphones. The software appeared on the company's line of Palm devices while several other licensees have manufactured devices powered by Palm OS.
A Pocket PC is a class of personal digital assistant (PDA) that runs the Windows Mobile or Windows Embedded Compact operating system that has some of the abilities of modern desktop PCs. The name was introduced by Microsoft in 2000 as a rebranding of the Palm-size PC category. Some of these devices also had integrated phone and data capabilities, which were called Pocket PC Phone Edition. Windows "Smartphone" is another Windows CE based platform for non-touch flip phones or dumber phones.
Palm is a line of personal digital assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones developed by California-based Palm, Inc., originally called Palm Computing, Inc. Palm devices are often remembered as "the first wildly popular handheld computers," responsible for ushering in the smartphone era.
The iPAQ is a discontinued Pocket PC and personal digital assistant which was first unveiled by Compaq in April 2000.
Windows Embedded Compact, formerly Windows Embedded CE, Windows Powered and Windows CE, is an operating system family developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows Embedded family of products.
The Sharp Zaurus is the name of a series of personal digital assistants (PDAs) made by Sharp Corporation. The Zaurus was the most popular PDA during the 1990s in Japan and was based on a proprietary operating system. The first Sharp PDA to use the Linux operating system was the SL-5000D, running the Qtopia-based Embedix Plus. The Linux Documentation Project considers the Zaurus series to be "true Linux PDAs" because their manufacturers install Linux-based operating systems on them by default. The name derives from the common suffix applied to the names of dinosaurs.
Casio Cassiopeia was the brand name of a PDA manufactured by Casio. It used Windows CE as the Operating system. Casio was one of the first manufacturers of PDAs, developing at the beginning small pocket-sized computers with keyboards and grayscale displays and subsequently moving to smaller units in response to customer demand.
The Tungsten series was Palm, Inc.'s line of business-class Palm OS-based PDAs.
Windows Mobile was a family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones and personal digital assistants.
The Psion Series 7 is a subnotebook computer from Psion that was released in 2000. In size it is fairly original: larger than a palmtop or handheld machine, but smaller than a laptop computer. It was the first and last of the Psion series to have a full color electronic visual display. It has a leather-bound clamshell design, with a touch-sensitive, Video Graphics Array (VGA) resolution liquid-crystal display (LCD) and QWERTY computer keyboard. Internally it has a 132.71 MHz StrongARM SA-1100 processor, 16 megabyte (MB) of random-access memory (RAM) and 16 MB of internal read-only memory (ROM).
A handheld personal computer (PC) is a pocket-sized computer typically built around a clamshell form factor and is significantly smaller than any standard laptop computer, but based on the same principles. It is sometimes referred to as a palmtop computer, not to be confused with Palmtop PC which was a name used mainly by Hewlett-Packard.
The XGP was a concept portable video game system created by the Korean company GamePark as the follow-up to its GP32 handheld. Initially announced in 2005, the XGP was finally announced in March 2006 along with the release of the similar XGP Mini and the XGP Kids. The company went bankrupt before releasing any of the models.
The Palm IIIxe is a discontinued Palm personal digital assistant that was designed and manufactured by Palm, Inc. It cost US$249 when new.
The Jornada was a line of personal digital assistants or PDAs manufactured by Hewlett-Packard. The Jornada was a broad product line that included Palm-Size PCs, Handheld PCs, and Pocket PCs. The first model was the 820, released in 1998, and the last was the 928 model in 2002 when Compaq and HP merged. The Jornada line was then succeeded by the more popular iPAQ model PDAs. All Jornada models ran Microsoft Operating Systems that were based on Windows CE.
The Palm m100 series consists of four Palm OS based personal digital assistants titled m100, m105, m125, and m130. These models were intended to be "entry-level" PDAs, and therefore their cases were built from cheaper materials. Most notably, the covers of the LCD screens and the digitizers were plastic rather than glass, and the screens were smaller than the more expensive Palm devices on sale at the time.
The MobilePro is a discontinued line of personal digital assistants manufactured by NEC. Most models in the MobilePro range were handheld PCs with almost full size keyboards and a compact form placing them between being a palmtop and a subnotebook. All of the models in the MobilePro range ran a version of Microsoft's Windows CE mobile operating system and could be navigated using a stylus and touchscreen.
The HP 300LX was one of the first handheld PCs designed to run the Windows CE 1.0 operating system from Microsoft. Unlike other HPCs of the time, the resistive touch screen had an enhanced screen resolution of 640x240 with 4 shades of grey, rather than the standard 480x240 resolution of other devices, such as the Casio Cassiopeia A-10. The device also sported a full PC card slot, a serial link cable plug, and an infrared port.
Pocket PC 2000 was the first member of the Windows Mobile family of mobile operating systems that was released on April 19, 2000, and was based on Windows CE 3.0. It is the successor to the operating system aboard Palm-size PCs. Backwards compatibility was retained with such Palm-size PC applications.
The Sony Clie PEG-NZ90 was a flagship handheld PDA announced by Sony in January 2003. This model was feature-packed, further improving on the capabilities of the NX series models. Like its predecessors, this handheld had a vertical clamshell swivel-screen form factor, and was powered by a 200mhz Intel XScale CPU, running the Palm OS.
