PDA sales are up again
Since quite sometime now the PDA has taken the backseat. With mobile phones getting smarter with Smartphones coming out in the market, few people were looking towards the PDAs leading to lack of sales for these devices. Many PDAs out there now are more like merged products offering functionalities of a mobile phone and a digital diary.
However, times are changing and the fully functional PDAs are back on the sales chart. A report released by the research firm Gartner claims that the sales have grown by almost 25% and a lot of it can be contributed to the fact that people are interesting in having access to their emails on the move through wireless Internet access. The report claimed that almost 55% of PDAs sold in the first three months of this year had Wi-Fi or cellular capability.
Research in Motion has been the biggest beneficiary of this changing trend as they displaced the long reigning champion of PDA PalmOne as the largest seller of PDAs in the market with their blackberry mobile device. It is a huge hit amongst enterprise sector enabling the corporates to stay connected to their office networks on the move.
In the Operating System powering these PDAs, Palm-based devices made up just 20% of the market today down from almost double that last year. Dominating force in this area is now the Windows CE-based devices, which made up 43% of the market. Another market where software giant is looking towards getting a majority stake might not be good news for the industry.
The research however had certain conflicting factors with the researchers taking the recently unveiled PalmOne Treo 650 as a Smartphone instead of a PDA. The device has been a huge success amongst the consumers and the statistics might have been a lot different if it was included in the research.
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May 9th, 2005 at 7:35 pm
I think people are missing the point. Consumers want a single device to provide phone and PDA functions. The curent technology is forcingtrade-offs but that’s hopefully a timing thing. battery life, size and sound quality are key to me for a phone. Screen size and running multiple programs at once are critical for PDA. I want to browse the internet and send text messages cross over functionality. I also use a GPS. I recently bought a Dell Axim 50v and a Treo 650. Both are beautiful devices that have made great strides over previous models. Neither is close to perfect. I don’t want 2 devices just one. I don’t want to spend a fortune for internet/text messaging services. I don’t have a problem with paying for the device but phone companies and cable companies are preventing the use of these devices with the cost of their service plans. In my opinion there are still some convergence issues to be addressed but the cost of the ongoing service plans is the major roadblock here.
May 25th, 2005 at 6:53 am
Necessity for convergence is a myth created by tech savvy people and by engineers whose cherished dream is optimal utilization of resources. The people in general are technology averse or technology conservative and are put off by too much of technology. One should provide convergence when the man on the street asks for it.