Power consumption and display capabilities continue to sabotage progress in any of these areas, but Intel is hoping to step into the breach with Xscale, a microarchitecture touted for low power and high performance. The processor, which builds on Intel's StrongARM design and is backward compatible with it, features dynamic power and frequency management, and scaling.

Meanwhile, Intel is also toying with the idea of promoting Xscale's use in robotic controllers.

With Xscale, "instead of everyone being in the same range, now you'll have a wide range of processing power [in PDAs]," said Todd Kort, principal analyst at Gartner Dataquest. "That will enable more powerful machines, maybe even able to do voice recognition."

Voice makes a lot of sense for PDAs, Kort said, "but only if it works. Xscale will go a long way toward enabling voice, but it [voice] still takes all the processing power you can throw at it."

Palm Inc. holds the lion's share of the personal digital assistant market, at 58 percent, but Kort said that PDA has been hampered by a severe lack of processing power. Based on Motorola's Dragonball processor, "the Palm only went from 16 to 33 MHz over five years," he said.

Though Palm itself has moved to Texas Instruments Inc.'s Omap architecture, Kort believes that some of its licensees — perhaps Handspring or Sony — might opt for Xscale. "It seems likely that Intel will be the major player in PDAs," he said.

The first instantiations of Intel's X-scale, the PXA250 and PXA210, run at 400 MHz and 200 MHz, respectively.

The PXA250 is targeting high-end PDAs where video streaming, MP3 audio and wireless connectivity are key, said David Rogers, communications manager for Intel's Handheld Computing Division. "It's really an SoC [system-on-chip] with a host of peripheral connections." For the PXA210, he said, "we're looking at entry-level devices, such as smart phones, etc."

Both devices include an LCD controller, two direct-memory-access channels, 2.5-volt memory support and X-scale's Integrated Performance Primitives. The 250 has additional support for CompactFlash and PC Card connections. Other interfaces include Bluetooth, multiple UARTs and off-chip graphics accelerator support.

Underscoring the power/performance advantage, Rogers said that the 250 "consumes half the power of our SA1110 running at 200 MHz" — namely, 256 milliwatts. At 300 MHz, the 250 consumes 411 mW, while the idle and sleep modes consume 100 mW and 50 microamps, respectively. Power is further reduced on the 210, said Rogers, through the use of a 16-bit bus instead of the 32/16-bit bus on the 250, as well as by eliminating various interfaces, including GPIOs.

Intel's PXA250 Xscale processor is priced at $39.20 and comes in a 17 x 17-mm, 256-pin ball grid array. The PXA210, packaged in a 225-pin thin BGA, is priced at $17. Both are sampling now, with production set for the middle of the year.

PDA shipment growth has been sliding, according to Neil Strother, senior analyst of wireless-handset and access devices at Cahners InStat. "A little over 6.8 million PDAs shipped in 2000, vs. 8 million in 2001," he said. That amounts to 17 percent growth, down from 36 percent in the 1999-2000 period. Strothers expects growth to improve slightly in 2002, to 18 percent, driven by better wireless connectivity with the advent of such technologies as Bluetooth, better applications and lower unit prices.

Fashion statement?

"The pricing of these devices has kept the truly useful [ones] from the mass market," said Strothers. "And the enterprise has been slow in deploying them corporatewide, thanks both to cost and a lack of truly useful productivity tools."

"Some here [at Dataquest] see these devices more as toys than anything else," said Kort. "I see them more as fashion items, and until we start getting good wireless capabilities you're not going to see a lot of productivity gains out of them." Also, he said, "batteries still put a lot of limitations on them."

Though Kort is confident that Palm will remain the PDA leader for some time, he noted that "Palm lost about 10 points last year, while PocketPC" — Microsoft's PDA initiative — "grew from 11 to 20 percent" market share. But Kort sees lack of differentiation among PocketPC 2002 devices as a serious problem.

PocketPC 2002 can be viewed as an application running on top of Windows CE. "However, because Microsoft set such a high baseline of necessary functionality, all the PDAs in this area are running the same 206-MHz chip, 240 x 320[-pixel] display, 64 Mbytes of RAM," said Kort. "Even pricing is similar, it's down to whose brand do you prefer."

On the Palm side, Kort believes the company's recent move to TI's Omap architecture "will enhance its [Palm Pilot's] capabilities in a big way." At the same time, Palm's abandonment of Motorola's Dragonball doesn't bode well for Motorola's own PDA efforts, said In-Stat's Strothers.

"While Motorola is stepping up to the plate with the upcoming MX1 processor — for which design wins have yet to be announced — it is still being marginalized somewhat by the efforts of both TI and now Intel," Strothers said.

At the PalmSource conference last week, Motorola announced a development agreement with Palm and Sega that would open up the Palm platform for Sega game developers through Motorola's MX1 processor.

"This allows over 190,000 Palm software developers to port Sega games to the MX1," said Ed Valdez, who is director of wireless-platform marketing for Motorola's Wireless and Broadband Systems Group.