At some point in the past year, the handheld market exploded.

Kaboom! PDAs everywhere. It was like some World War II movie except all the shrapnel has been replaced by the glowing iridescence of backlit PDAs. Or maybe, instead of a World War II movie, the explosion was just a proliferation of products and advertisements. Over the past twelve months, at least 50 percent of the circulars in my Sunday paper seemed to feature a PDA advertisement. And the ads weren't limited to just the powerhouses like Palm and Pocket PC or the retail giants like Best Buy and Circuit City. A host of other devices (like DaVinci and Rex) and sellers (like Wal-Mart and Target) joined the fray.

As those other devices and retailers have helped saturate a once polarized market, the prices have begun to fall. A Palm m100 can be purchased for little more than $100, and an HP Jornada 525 goes for around $300.

Handheld for the common man
What the saturation of the handheld market and the subsequent drop in price means is that the handheld has suddenly become available to a much wider audience -- soccer moms and school kids, grandparents and baby-sitters. And the marketing agencies have gone after them. In a recent Sears circular, it isn't just the astute businessman or businesswoman standing next to the PDAs, it's a friendly couple-an average man and woman.

Whether it was the market pricing that caused it or the pervasiveness of the devices, one thing is clear about the Sears circular and the message it sends: the PDA is evolving into a device to help us (all of us) manage the daily business of our lives.

When you think about it, such a concept makes sense. Our lives are filled with a growing amount of data: friends and family contact information, things we need to do, times we need to be somewhere. Up until now, people used little scraps of paper or, in the case of those "Type A" personalities, a paper planner, to keep themselves organized. To me, it seems like, until recently, PDAs have been typically embraced primarily by business users.