TELECOMS & MOBILE
Microsoft dominates improving PDA market
23-01-2004
by
Western European PDA shipments were up 38 percent in the fourth quarter and up 28 percent during the whole of 2003, the first full year of growth since 2000.
According to the latest numbers from IDC, PDA (personal digital assistant) shipments in Western Europe hit 2.6 million last year, thanks in part to 958,000 unit shipments in the last three months of the year. In 2002, just under 2 million handheld computers/PDAs were shipped, with 693,000 leaving manufactures' storehouses in the fourth quarter of that year. Low prices and new bundled packages drove the healthy growth, IDC said.
"Last quarter saw Pocket PC vendors reap the rewards of an expanded retail presence, in-store marketing, and targeted promotions such as GPS and camera bundles," said senior Analyst Tim Mui. "A consumer market drawn to attractive low-cost Pocket PC offerings and a renewed interest in mobile solutions from large and medium enterprises helped Pocket PC devices to overtake Palm OS-based products in 2003."
In fact, sales of Microsoft's Pocket PC operating system outpaced Palm sales by a wide margin. For the full year, 1.423 million Pocket PC-based PDAs were shipped in Europe, compared to 1.039 million Palm-based devices. In the last three months of the year, the Microsoft operating system was in 60 percent of PDAs shipped in Western Europe, compared to about 32 percent a year ago. Conversely, Palm software was in about 40 percent of Western Europe's new PDAs in Q4, compared to about 54 percent a year earlier.
Pocket PC's strength helped HP become the top hardware vendor, with 37 percent market share, compared to Palm's 30 percent market share in the final months of last year. In Q4 2002, HP had a small 20 percent share versus Palm's 51 percent share. For the full 2003 year, the two companies finished neck and neck, with Palm marginally ahead of HP with a 32.3 percent market share.
Rounding out the top five in the most recent fourth quarter were German vendor Medion with a 10 percent share, compared to nil in Q4 2002; Sony with a near 8 percent market share, falling from almost 12 percent last year; and Dell with a 4.2 percent share, versus nil in the fourth quarter of 2002.
Creating successful email surveys: Denise Cox of email specialist Newsweaver argues that you can tap into your readers' likes or dislikes by surveying them.
