Personal digital assistant

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Personal digital assistant" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (November 2012) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

A personal digital assistant (PDA) is a multi-purpose mobile device which functions as a personal information manager. Following a boom in the 1990's and 2000's, PDA's were mostly displaced by the widespread adoption of more highly capable smartphones, in particular those based on iOS and Android in the late 2000's, and thus saw a rapid decline.^[1][2]

A PDA has an electronic visual display. Most models also have audio capabilities, allowing usage as a portable media player, and also enabling many of them to be used as telephones. By the early 2000s, nearly all PDA models had the ability to access the Internet, intranets or extranets via Wi-Fi or Wireless WANs, and since then generally included a web browser. Sometimes, instead of buttons, later PDAs employ touchscreen technology.