Adventures in .NET
This may be me revealing my ignorance, but if they can create mp3 players with 20gb of storage for $199, why can't they make a PDA with 20gb of storage for $500? Is there a technological reason this hasn't been done?
Good question, supply and demand? So far as I know, the IPod is about as small as you can get - and this is no doubt one of the reasons for it's popularity (oh, and the battery *almost* lasts a whole work day). I have no doubt that someone will make a PDA that small and with that battery life (which would make it a *consumer* level product) - give it time!
Building pda with hard drive is a challenge and balance between battery and the circuitry in embedding more chips. Juice consuming parts in pda are mainboard with processor with less instruction set compared to desktop line processors, they can provide enough battery to use pda for couple of hours or half a day or so. if they put hard disk into pda they have to provide battery power to hard disk for it to seek data and write data , solid state memory cards consume less memory compared to hard disk. The conclusion of the story is PDA's are going to become bulky, because they have put bigger size batteries to supply enough power to all parts of pda