The Complete Handbook of PDA Cases

Chapter 1: Understanding PDA Cases

In the most literal sense, a PDA case is a protective enclosure designed to fit around a handheld personal digital assistant. But that definition is too thin to be useful to a professional. To understand what a PDA case actually is, you have to look at what it does in the field, what it fails to do when it's designed poorly, and why it is so often the most critical, and most underestimated, accessory on the job site. A case is not an accessory in the decorative sense. It is a piece of equipment, like a tool belt, a hard hat, or a industrial ladder—it has a job to perform, and it needs to be selected, inspected, and maintained as such.

Walk through any distribution warehouse that still uses handheld inventory scanners, or any rural utility yard where technicians check meters, and you will see a wide variety of cases. There will be belt-clip hard shell cases, beaten and showing the scuffs of dozens of concrete floor drops. There will be gel-skin covers faded from sun exposure. There will be heavy-duty polymer enclosures with glass screen protectors that have been replaced multiple times. The original PDAs, the early Palm Pilots and Handspring Visors, were designed for a desk or a pocket. That simple pocket was the first use case. But the category quickly became industrial, as businesses realized the value of a computer that could be held while standing, walking, and moving through a building.