HP ships wrong PDA figures, revival now not a revival

[Jason Dunn]

<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/27883.html">http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/27883.html</a><br /><br />Did HP hire the Enron accountants to tabulate device sales? Sheesh - not a good thing to be inaccurate about.<br /><br />"Hopes that the PDA market is stabilizing were dashed yesterday when Gartner Dataquest revised its third quarter figures for the market after it emerged Hewlett Packard Co had supplied erroneous shipment numbers to the research firm. Palo Alto, California-based HP this week discovered a discrepancy in the data it originally supplied to Gartner only after the research firm published its third quarter PDA figures earlier this week. The revised figures HP supplied to Gartner showed its shipments in the first quarter were 292,850, 23% lower than previously thought. <br /><br />The discrepancy meant that HP did not take second place in the market behind Palm, as previously thought, but was in fact in third place, with 11.5% of the market overall, compared to 12.1% last year. As a result Sony took second place, with 13.5% of the market, compared to 3.5% last year. Market leader Palm took 31.7% of the market. More importantly, HP's slip-up meant that total market shipments were 2.55 million, down 2.4% on the year, instead of up 0.9% as earlier thought." Source: PDA Gerbil

[ThomasC22]

Ed will be so disappointed :(

This is sad not only for HPaq but for the the PocketPC industry as a whole. With all the things coming I certainly don't feel that it changes things (PPCs are still doing way better than they used to) but it does do a lot to halt the momentum the Platform had.

Hopefully, Dell and Viewsonic will be able to post significant figures in the next year. It's funny, even with this info, compared to a year ago, a lot has changed (for the better).

[Paragon]

I have a feeling that the PPC numbers will make a very dramatic jump in the coming months. With Dell, and ViewSonic selling much cheaper devices it will make a big difference. At the recent Pocket PC Summit Richard Stone of HP stated during a keynote that HP would definitely have a device to compete with Dell. There are going to be a wack of PPCs out there soon selling for less than many Palm devices. Maybe then HP won't have to mistakenly deliver the wrong numbers

Dave

[Skoobouy]

I really want to say this: HP, serves you right for dumping your Jornada.

I mean, HP *totally* made the same mistake Palm did last year; they sat back on their cozy, newly acquired iPaq easychair, arbitrarily raised prices higher than any other PPC on the market, and all laughed about how they would be on top of the PDA hill without even trying. Forgive me if I look at their egg-covered faces with just a little more satisfaction than is proper.

Pffft. Somebody's out of touch with the market, and this time it ain't Palm.

Of course, I temper all of this by saying that the iPaq is an excellent machine that makes lots of people happy. But I don't think too many people praise HP's pricing scheme, the death of the Jornada, the obstinant refusal by HP to accomidate customers with built-in CF, and so on.

I fully expect Toshiba, Viewsonic, Dell and Siemens to mop the floor with HP.