Mobile Entertainment

We've recently had the resurrection of the boy band, the reemergence of high-waisted trousers and an unlikely renaissance in Welsh sport.

Add to that list the Personal Digital Assistant. Three years ago the PDA as a product line was dead in the water. Usurped by the smartphone and especially devices like the BlackBerry, the PDA suddenly had little to offer its mostly corporate user-base.

The rot set in as far back as 2003 when annual PDA shipments peaked at a miserly 11 million units. Companies like Sony started to pull out of the market in 2004. And that was that. All hail Symbian (which hopped beds from PDAs to phones with adulterous speed).

But was that it? For all intents and purposes, the PDA is coming back in a big way. Or so certain stakeholders in the market hope. There are some big differences this time round though - no-one is calling these next-gen portable computers PDAs and, perhaps more importantly, content-hungry consumers are the target market.

It all started with the Ultra-Mobile PC initiative a few years back, with attention now centered on Intel's Mobile Internet Device drive.

Intel's Atom mobile multimedia chipsets will probably start shipping in meaningful device numbers next year. Nvidia is targeting its Tegra chips at the same market, promising HD video in the palm of your hand.

Researcher Forward Concepts reckons MID sales will grow from 305,000 units this year to 40 million in 2012. There are devices already in the market hinting at what's possible: Nokia's 810 Internet Tablet and Apple's iPod Touch to name but two. Both are essentially PDAs with bells on.

Combine all this with wider connectivity trends like WiMAX and Qualcomm's Gobi initiative and it's looking like the 'mobile' content market could have a very different complexion in the not too distant future.

As Intel CEO Paul Otellini said recently: “If you accept that the value proposition of the high-end of the mobile phone market is full internet access that happens to have voice, my view is that it's easier to add voice to a small computer than vice-versa."