I did my project on the Personal Digital Assistant(PDA). I was not able to get one to dissect but I did find a video and a website about the teardown process. I initially thought that the slide up phones like the Blackberry phones were examples of a PDA but I learned that these phones evolved from the PDA. That made my ask “What is a PDA?”.
https://www.techtarget.com/searchmobilecomputing/definition/personal-digital-assistant
After some research from techtarget.com I understood a PDA to be almost a mini computer that is used on a personal level to track calendars, agendas and contact info. I think this helped because it gave me other information on the types of PDA’s, the history and the future of PDA’s. I tried to confirm this information with further research and found more about the first PDA and its origin, who coined the term and when it became popular.
I decided to focus on the components and what they do and who invented them instead of where the piece in the device was manufactured. I wasn’t able to find alot about where they were manufactured anyways, so this still worked out for me.
https://goughlui.com/2015/04/04/unintentional-teardown-hp-ipaq-h5550-windows-mobile-2003-pda/
I focused on the 2003 HP IPAQ 5550 for my project. I followed EEVBLOG on YouTube for a teardown of the PDA and used Gough’s techzone site for more details on the chips and components of the board. I noticed that there were a lot of the same components like batteries and oscillators, but there were different versions with different purposes or on different ends of the boards. This made it hard to get about 8 different components because I would find that I had 3 of the same component.
I wish that HP had a document that explained why they composed the board and the device the way they did. I think that they would explain why they chose certain components over other to get the final product.
