Or maybe not.
There has been a search for the Next PC since the first PC. In the late '80s, John Doerr thought it was pen-based computing, and invested in Eo and Go, later merged into what a long-forgotten wit called Ego. Now Ego is long forgotten. In the early '90s, John Sculley thought it was PDAs, and he began his long slide from tech fame after his infamous proclamation that the Newton would win a major part of a "Trillion Dollar Market." In the mid-'90s, Jeff Hawkins said handwriting recognition was not possible on a small device, and then he went on to prove himself wrong a year later by founding Palm. He left Palm and innovated a second time by adding cellphone capability to a PDA , calling it the Treo; but by then was destined to lose out to the RIM and its addictive Blackberry, called the Crackberry among the Digerati. Why he lost is very instructive - more on this below.
In the 'Oughts we now believe that the Cellphone is the Next PC. And what a PC it is! The PC is a mature product with annual sales around 200M units, while the cellphone has rocketed past those volumes towards 1B units per year. Features in the cellphone either get adopted at massive scale, or dropped. Cellcams made the cut. Music is now being tried. Microdrives may be next. And keyboards. And so on. Is it the next PC? Let's take a closer look.
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