Chapter 2: Qualcomm PDQ, the first integrated PDA/OS/Mobile Phone -and why it perished

Jeffrey Belk
7 min readJun 29, 2021

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Packaging for Qualcomm PDQ 800 (image grabbed from Paul Jacob’s twitter feed, thanks Paul!)

Ok, so I‘m writing again, and I’ve been getting emails and texts asking “where’s Chapter 2”? Here it is.

Chapter 1 was about how the name “Smartphone” came about in the wireless industry, and why the thing in your pocket or purse is called a Smartphone today and not a “digital thingee”. That happened in 1997.

It’s a year later, 1998, and there’s a lot of new types of mobile phones appearing. Lots of exploration. Ah, exploration. Successful exploration, whether of land, sea, space or smartphones requires EVERYTHING to come together successfully, or else disaster ensues. This is true for new categories of mobile devices, as well as global exploration. A cautionary tale is the tale of Ferdinand Magellan, whom we we know from the history books as the first person to lead a global circumnavigation by sail. Well…that’s true, but Magellan also died at age 41 in the year 1521 by getting a spear stuck in him in what is now the Philippines, and then “later surrounded and finished off with other weapons”.

Exploration is the tale of the Qualcomm PDQ, which was the first wireless device that combine a broadly used Device/Application/OS platform (Digital Phone/Palm Pilot/Palm OS). For folks that would say, “you are wrong, the Nokia Communicator 9000 was first”, I’d rebut with “nope, that was a phone with rudimentary PDA apps, not a device with an OS like Palm’s with a fledgeling app ecosystem”, but would caveat that the more explorers the better, and Nokia was an amazing explorer in those times. But unfortunately, explorers can have a high casualty rate.

There’s a business lesson below, one that’s still applicable today to LOTS of products and services, wireless and otherwise, with a TLA (Three Letter Acronym) I’ve used for years.

No, in this context NDA is NOT non-disclosure, but Network, Device, and Applications.

First a disclaimer to folks involved in the journey, spearing, and demise of the Qualcomm PDQ. It’s still part of wireless history, and will forever, even earning a spot on the website of the Museum of American History for it’s short lived journey.

The idea for the PDQ was sound, but the path was fraught with peril. I don’t have access to any files, just what’s on the internet, so here goes. In the late 1990’s many of us out there in Tech land were fans of the Palm Pilot, which was a VERY successful “Personal Digital Assistant” that launched originally in 1996. Here’s an ad from 1996.

Palm Pilot (Image: Wikipedia)

The Palm Pilot could sync to your PC for appointments, messages, meetings, note taking. The Palm Pilot consisted of a simple stylus input (see left)+ proprietary note taking language called Graffiti +low contrast monochrome 240x160 screen + proprietary OS called Palm OS + its 512 kilobyte (512KB), or 1 megabyte (yes, 1MB) of onboard memory to its job. And believe it or not, it DID do its job, was really cool to use given the device/cost constraints of the day, and appropriately sold a ton. But simple? No.

In “Chapter One”, the category name smartphone came into being, and the illustrious and creative leader of Qualcomm’s rapidly growing phone business Paul Jacobs wanted us to explore. As I recall, Paul cut a deal with Donna Dubinsky, a Palm top executive to develop a new device (a SMART device) that integrated the Cool PDA/OS capabilities of the Palm Pilot, with the emerging digital data capabilities of a Qualcomm Digital Phone, such as the Qualcomm “Thin Phone”. That deal allowed Paul to greenlight the R&D and product management teams to explore lands never seen. In retrospect, it was a really gutsy move, but not easy…sorta like trying to be the first to circumnavigate the globe in the early 1500's.

And so, in September 1998 (almost nine years before iPhone!), Qualcomm introduced PDQ Smartphone with a Press Release and lots of fanfare (busy times for my group and I). Like Magellan, the life of the PDQ was short lived, and it’s now part of history, but significant enough that you can still find the PDQ on the Smithsonian Website!

This article from SFGate in October, 1998, lays out the challenges the PDQ faced. It describes that folks want Digital Cell Phones that “double as personal organizers”, allow for position location via “Global Positioning Systems”, allows users to “surf the web and send e-mail from their phones”, and maybe getting ahead of their skis for 1998 “Remote diagnostics that allow doctors to tap into a hospital’s system with their phone and scan X-rays and patient charts”.

Or this “People take out a pager, a phone, a PalmPilot, a whole proliferation of devices. They want all these things to proliferate data”, said Jeff Belk, vice president of marketing for Qualcomm…Or another Jeff quote from this Wall Street Journal Article, “there are phones that are purely communications centric, there are devices that are purely data-centric, and now you are seeing devices that will fall in the center of the spectrum”.

However, the next quote from the SF Chronicle article may have foreshadowed the inevitable DOOM for the PDQ. “The PDQ is a fantastic merger of two different technologies, but you would be hard pressed to find someone to consider the solution elegant”, Lin said (Albert Lin, Abernathy Group). “To merge the two together, they’ve created a device that’s heavy and complex”.

Ouch, but accurate. But that wasn’t all of it.

Remember, NETWORK, DEVICE, APPLICATIONS. N, D, A.

NETWORK: This Fortune Magazine article described how the available data speeds of circa 1998 wireless networks were 9.6 and 14.4 Kilobytes per second. Another CNN article describes how carriers at the time priced data “by the minute” at “$9.99 for the first 50 data minutes and 39 cents per additional minute beyond that”. From the WSJ article above “$10 per month for about 50 kilobytes of data — -six transactions a day”. For 14.4 kbps data! Which might not even actually connect to the device or do anything a bunch of the time, as data connectivity was still nascent.

DEVICE: The PDQ was heavy (over nine ounces), it was bulky, its screen was 240x160 dim monochrome pixels, its battery life sucked. The software crashed often, as integrating a Palm OS device with an early digital phone was hard. Really hard. Plus, it was tough and expensive to make, as the supply chains were not prepared for this type of device. For consumers, business or personal, the device was expensive to buy and the wireless data service was expensive and spotty at best. There were IMMENSE challenges of getting Wireless Carriers understand just what the heck the PDQ was, and getting their channels/stores to get past all the complexity. And even if a carrier wanted to buy the PDQ, they had to spend precious inventory $$$ to stock an expensive, low volume, specialty device, and allocate limited training time & staff to teach sales folks to sell the PDQ — all the while during a time when VOICE minutes were driving carrier revenues and gross margins.

APPLICATIONS: The PDQ had the suite of Palm OS based and 3rd party PDA apps, but the network, device/display were limiting to real device utility. For example, from the CNN article: “Since the PDQ’s Web browser cannot display standard web images…you are forced to try and make sense of pages designed for 15–17 inch color monitors”. Or “since email messages can be at times huge, PDQmail also offers ability to limit how many characters of each message to download”. Remember…$10 for 50 KILOBYTES!

Or, to repeat the perfect summation of Mr. Lin above, “heavy and complex”.

2001 Kyocera 6035, the PDQ’s successor. Source: Wikipedia

The PDQ was the first, because Paul Jacobs’s and Qualcomm’s management team took the jump and put it out there. Exploration ain’t easy, and often isn’t pretty. However, iteration and evolution are powerful forces. In December, 1999, Qualcomm sold its mobile phone division to Kyocera Wireless . LoL, beyond all the challenges above, we were building Qulacomm phones like the PDQ in La Jolla, California…not exactly the low cost manufacturing hub! This dimension alone was the R&D/production cost equivalent of the spear that got Magellan. In 2001 (iPhone minus 6 years), Kyocera introduced the Kyocera 6035, which would have been the PDQ v2…which was smaller, lighter, more powerful…better…and another step leading to the phones in our pockets and purses. After that? There was the Kyocera 7135, even smaller, cooler, color screen, GPS, WSJ/Walt Mossberg review here. And then…the spear.

There’s more to this journey, but that, of course, will continue in “Chapter Three”.

Jeff. (Ocreati Advisors)

PS….a lot of folks that read this will have their own perspectives on the PDQ…from a product management, engineering, finance, sales, folks who actually had the PDQ, and other perspectives. From current Qualcomm folks, or former Qualcomm people like myself, Carrier folks, and other companies. There has been a lot written on device evolution by tech journalists and other from the ‘outside’, but I’m looking to lay out what happened “from the inside”. Feel free to weigh in with comments / thoughts, and if you think others out there might have something to add, or might get value from these and other chapters, PLEASE SHARE THIS!

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Jeffrey Belk
Jeffrey Belk

Written by Jeffrey Belk

Ecosystem builder, Technology Advocate, Fortune 500 technology executive, leader, communicator, Board Member, and trusted advisor.

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