PDA Sales Continue To Fall
By Amy Gilroy -- TWICE, 11/7/2005
FRAMINGHAM, Mass — PDA sales fell for the seventh consecutive quarter of year-over-year decline, said IDC, based here. For the third quarter of 2005, worldwide PDA sales dropped 16.9 percent over last year and 8.8 percent sequentially, to 1.6 million units, IDC said.
New PDA features such as built-in GPS and software upgrades should help slightly improve holiday sales, but these will still fall below the fourth quarter last year, IDC predicted.
At the same time, the growth of smartphones is infringing on PDA sales, and “those vendors who offer both devices are starting to see shipments of converged mobile devices equal or surpass shipments of handheld devices,” said IDC's analyst Ramon Llama.
“The combination of tremendous competition from converged mobile devices with waning consumer demand for handhelds is forcing manufacturers to search for new or improved solutions that leverage existing hardware and software capabilities,” said Llamas. “Offering solutions beyond PIM, such as GPS, and reaching out towards first-time users are important steps, but will not necessarily bring about a return to growth. Finding and expanding more solutions to modern mobile consumers and enterprises have become imperatives for the handheld market to drive growth.”
According to IDC, market leader Palm experienced a 10.8 percent decline in shipments sequentially and a 22.7 percent decline year-over-year for the quarter. For the first time, its shipments of converged mobile devices outpaced the company's handheld devices. HP's shipments grew 4.4 percent with new product introductions in Europe and Asia/Pacific, but they decreased 35.4 percent year-over-year.
Top 5 Vendors For Handheld Devices| Q3 Rank | Vendor | Q3 05 Shipments | Q3 05 Market Share | Q3 04 Shipments | Q3 04 Market Share |
| 1 | Palm | 569,388 | 33.8% | 736,481 | 36.4% |
| 2 | Hewlett-Packard | 397, 016 | 23.6 | 615,515 | 30.4 |
| 3 | Acer | 188,760 | 11.2 | 36,232 | 1.8 |
| 4 | Dell | 162,000 | 9.6 | 188,200 | 9.3 |
| 5 | Mio | 85,609 | 5.1 | 54,172 | 2.7 |
| Others | 282,780 | 16.8 | 393,552 | 19.4 | |
| Total | 1,685,553 | 100.0% | 2,024,152 | 100.0% | |
| Source: IDC ©TWICE 2005 | |||||
No related content found.
VIEW ALL GALLERIES