[CoMoDev] Mobile device market trends
- From: David Beers <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <comodev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2004 09:14:34 -0600
This week the rumors that Sony might be backing out of the PDA market were
confirmed as Sony announced that it will not be releasing any new Clie
handhelds to the US market in the fall.
(http://www.brighthand.com/article/sayonara_clie) Sony has been the second
largest vendor of PDAs running the Palm OS and has made a name for themselves
by pioneering multimedia capabilities, high-resolution screens, and built-in
cameras in slick, well-engineered hardware that was appealing to the consumer
market. Unfortunately, the consumer market is not where handheld device growth
is happening now, and the features that once made the Clies unique are now
available in most new handheld computers, including many mobile phones. Sony
says it's reassessing the direction of the conventional PDA market, which is
hardly a surprise since its sales have dropped 45% from 2003.
On the other hand, there's more news indicating that smart phone sales are
increasing rapidly. So rapidly, in fact that the overall "mobile device"
market (handhelds, wireless handhelds, feature phones, and smart phones) grew
41% worldwide over this time last year
(http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=6867). Nokia edged out
palmOne this year for the top market share spot. Well, "edged" is probably not
the right word. More like "clobbered". PalmOne's smart phone sales, as big as
they were, were not enough to offset the reduced sales of it's standalone PDAs,
while Nokia shipments grew by 85% to take a 28% market share. PalmOne is still
king in the US by a pretty wide margin, thanks in large part to the Treo 600
smart phone (http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=6779).
Where is HP in all this? They gained 29% on their 2003 shipments, but lost
market share to Nokia and still ship only about 60% as many units as palmOne.
As developers we're probably interested in the OS market more than the
hardware, so how does that shake out? I'm still trying to figure this out,
actually. Palm OS and Windows CE are now in a dead heat in the PDA market
(http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=6769), but as near as I can
tell from the Canalys data, Palm OS still has an edge on Windows CE when you
count the smart phones. It's difficult to say by how much, since we don't have
numbers for smart phone vendors like Kyocera and Samsung, nor do we know how
many of those Motorolas run Windows now. The big question is the Symbian OS,
though. I don't know what percentage of those Nokias are running Symbian, but
I think it's quite high. If that's the case, then Symbian has a huge lead over
both Palm and Windows in the handheld OS market.
Does anyone own a Nokia smart phone that runs Symbian? I really need to look
into this.
David
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