News
[PSUs]| Friday 29th October 2004 |
IDC's figures showed a 8.7 per cent slump year on year for the third quarter of 2004 - the third successive quarter of year on year decline.
Significant factors contracting the market are of course the well publicised withdrawal of Sony and Toshiba from selling PDAs in the US. Sony, for one, saw shipments drop 81.5 per cent year on year, a major blow to Palm platform builders Palmsource, to whom Sony was the number two licencee.
palmOne showed a 12.7 per cent year on year decrease - sequentially a massive 20.3 per cent. This chopped nearly 7 per cent off its once mighty market share, which now stands at 34.7 per cent. Note that this contradicts the 25 per cent PDA market share reported by Canalys earlier this week - Nokia remains king of the mobile device market
Part of the problem is that nearly all mobile devices of any breed can handle the PDA's core function of calendar, address book and note-taking. Many phones and even music players, such as the iPod, manage this. And with Microsoft's share of the market growing, it becomes cheaper to use the Windows Mobile platform
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Areas where the PDA is selling are where it is developed as a device for specific needs such as GPS navigation systems and other niche markets. Indeed MiTAC capitalised on this too in Q3. Such niche markets are small, but the devices are more expensive. The challenge is to find more of them.
'In the face of intense competition from converged mobile devices capable of performing basic personal information management tasks, the worldwide handheld device market continues to struggle to evolve beyond its primary role as a PIM device,' said David Linsalata, analyst in IDC's Mobile Devices program. 'It is crucial that vendors push handheld devices into new market segments through the integration of existing technology such as GPS bundles in order to energize this market and return it to a growth path.'
Windows-based devices actually showed growth: Hewlett-Packard, with a brand new range, increased shipments 11.7 per cent year on year and 22.4 per cent sequentially. This put it past the 30 per cent market share mark and within 5 percentage points of leader palmOne.
Dell too, with its aggressive pricing and feature-rich devices bolstered its shipments 44 per cent year on year, nigh on 30 per cent sequentially, and gained a market share of 8.9 per cent.
However the overall picture remains glum with just 2.1mn units sold, and despite the sales of Windows devices, this was down sequentially by 4.6 per cent.
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