To get back on the original topic, posting this from MobEnta - probably the
best source of editorial and stats info out there right now....
++ 'consumer PDAs' is an oxymoron imho.
I also heard part of the S/E/// merger terms were such that ericsson has to
provide any radio interfaces for Sony devices. And of course having a
wireless enabled PDA would hurt e/// phone unit sales, so it will be a cold
day in hell (warm day in sweden?) before you see a Clie that can do data
well... or ever make phone calls...
roll on the SO505!
--------------------------- snip
* More Smartphones; Fewer PDAs
This week, two research companies chimed in with observations on the
PDA to smartphone switch. IDC noted a 21% drop in PDA sales,
compared to this quarter last year, while ARC Group forecast sales
of smartphones to grow to 45 million in 2007. Interestingly, the
IDC study explicitly excludes voice-capable devices, so Handspring
Treos and O2 XDAs are not counted (not that that would make a big
difference at this point). These numbers are to be expected:
wireless data connections are clearly valuable to PDA users, and
more and more, those devices will use cellular voice-and-data
networks (rather than older data-only systems like Mobitex and
ReFLEX). More interesting will be to see whether feature-phones
will tempt users away from PDA and smartphone purchases.
http://mobenta.com/analysis/item-934
Stat!
Top 10 Vendors of PDAs, 1Q 2003 (Preliminary)
Worldwide Handheld Device Shipments and Market Share
Rank Vendor Shipments Market Share
1 Palm 881,709 36.0%
2 Hewlett-Packard 444,000 18.1%
3 Sony 400,000 16.3%
4 Dell 159,000 6.5%
5 Toshiba 87,322 3.6%
6 Casio 83,250 3.4%
7 Handspring 70,000 2.9%
8 Sharp 68,960 2.8%
9 RIM 51,000 2.1%
10 GSL 48,500 2.0%
Other 158,300 6.5%
----------------------------------------
Total 2,452,041 100%
Received on Sat Apr 26 09:38:50 2003