PwC report rings death knell for desktop PCs

Wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs) will take over from PCs forcing network managers to integrate a multitude of devices, according to consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

In its recent report, PwC: 2000, the consultant claims the traditional desktop PC will lose its importance to mobile handheld devices with wireless internet access capabilities.

The report says: "Computers will disappear from the desktop and computing capabilities will be imbedded in the environment. Today we see two types of devices, cellular telephone handsets and handheld computers or PDAs, whose functionality is beginning to overlap."

The report's author, Ann Winblad, co-founding partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, said that if you use a variety of computing and communications devices the last thing you want is to manually synchronise the information between them. "If privacy and security can be maintained we are likely to move to a world in which even personal information becomes network resident," she said.

Winblad pointed out that advances in wireless communications technologies and protocols will play a key role in enabling PDAs. The cellular phone industry has just started a series of network enhancements called the second-and-a-half generation (2.5G) that boost wireless data speeds to 144Kbps. Because these enhancements are compatible with current infrastructure and spectrum allocations, 2.5G can be more rapidly deployed than the third-generation (3G).

However, the cellular industry will remain divided by incompatible wireless technologies.

The report also predicts the internet will increasingly use Extensible Markup Language (XML) as the basis for standards of presenting information and to enhance pre-programmed access by PDAs.