Hard Times Are The Only Increase For PDA Makers

Written by Adam Gosling

Tuesday, 08 August 2006

Facing its tenth straight quarter of declining sales, the PDA market has dropped more than 25 per cent since a year ago. The second quarter of 2006 saw vendors ship a total of 1.4 million devices according to industry bean counter, IDC. That's a 26.3 per cent decrease from the same quarter one year ago to be exact. For the first half of the year, vendors shipped a total of 2.9 million units, down 21.4% from the 3.7 million units shipped during the first half of 2005. In fact, mobilised read unconfirmed reports that Dell has completely given up on the form factor and has stopped all further development of PDA devices. Dell is number three in worldwide shipments of PDA devices, Palm remains the leader, followed by HP and then Acer in fourth position. Acer is a relative newcomer to this space but has been delivering strong growth in the past. In this quarter, Acer suffered the largest year-over-year decline of the top five players. Palm is the worldwide market leader by a large margin. Palm's shipments for the quarter numbered more than the next two vendors combined. Palm is also bolstered in a corporate sense by its move into the smartphone category. Although smartphones are not counted in these PDA numbers, IDC notes that Palm now sells more smartphones such as the Treo than straight PDA devices. HP remained the clear number 2 vendor of handheld devices worldwide, with double the shipment volume of the number 3 vendor, Dell. Like Palm, In second spot (with double the number of units from Dell) HP has also been developing its own line of converged mobile devices, but during Q2 HP's handheld devices still outpaced these smartphone sales. Dell has not released a converged mobile device to the market and in the PDA market is still seeling the same Axim X51 it has since phasing out the X30 and X50 products a year ago. Fourth spot was reserved for Mio which was able to post the smallest year-over-year decrease of the top five vendors allowing it to push Acer into fifth spot, said IDC. "Looking ahead, we expect additional quarters of decline and a flattening out of shipment activity before a return to growth," said Ramon Llamas, research analyst with IDC's Mobile Markets Team. If PDA makers have any hopes of returning to growth they need to discover more market segments and more relevant applications, he says. They need to make them more useful than the personal information managers they first launched as. Llamas says Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS have kept handheld devices relevant, particularly for core users, but more applications are needed to enable the devices to reach more users and eventually bring about a stabilizing effect to shipment activity. "The past ten quarters have provided a combination of factors that have led to this milestone: the exit of vendors from the handheld market, the shift of vendor focus from handheld devices to converged mobile devices (i.e. smartphones), and the increasing popularity of converged mobile devices overall," said Ramon Llamas, research analyst with IDC's Mobile Markets Team. Meanwhile, recent Gartner statistics show that if you add converged devices into these numbers, the market for handheld computes has actually grown in the past year. Gartner counts a PDA as a data-centric handheld that may have smartphone capabilities. The device must be designed for data-first, voice-second rather than a smartphone which would be designed first and foremost for voice with data capabilities added on. How many hands you use to operate the device counts a lot to Gartner also, two hands for a PDA and one hand for a smartphone. mobilised thinks the Gartner categorisation is all screwed up, it classes the BlackBerry as a PDA but not the Palm Treo. But there you have it. So if you count these phone capable PDAs into the mix, Gartner comes up with a year-on-year growth of 2.7 per cent for the second quarter reaching 3.7 million units. RIM of course came out on top here with a 22.5 per cent market share, followed by Palm, 12.7 per cent; and Hewlett-Packard, 10.4 per cent. Most of the growth however, came from the smaller players, Mio, Motorola and Danger Research.   Related news items The Poor Man's Palm -02/10/2007 Palm Goes Consumer With Treo 500v -12/09/2007 First Windows 6 Palm In Australia -12/09/2007 HP Goes iPaq Mad -06/09/2007 ASUS A686/696 GPS PDA -23/08/2007 Newer news items Fujitsu Siemens To Give Up On PDAs -13/08/2007 HP Plans More iPaqs As PDAs Become Smartphones -12/08/2007 Motorola Mobile Office Has Barcode Reader -02/05/2007 Q1 #2 -19/03/2007 HP Will Also Offer Draft n Notebooks -09/11/2006 Older news items O2 Beefs Up XDA Atom For Business Users -28/06/2006 Acer Plans PDA Phone, GPS Devices -04/06/2006 BlackBerry Shows Its Fun Side -09/05/2006 PDAs CONTINUE DECLINE: IDC -05/02/2006 WORLD’S SMALLEST MULTIMEDIA PDA-PHONE -09/11/2005 Tag This Now: