PDA Sales Reach Record Levels

[Ed Hansberry]

<a href="http://news.com.com/PDA+shipments+near+record+levels/2100-1047_3-5815873.html?tag=nefd.top">http://news.com.com/PDA+shipments+near+record+levels/2100-1047_3-5815873.html?tag=nefd.top</a><br /><br /><i>"According to a report by Gartner, worldwide shipments of personal digital assistants totaled 3.6 million units in the last three months, a 32 percent jump from the same period last year. The market is now on track to reach 15 million units shipped by the end of 2005, Gartner analysts said. If that happens, it would surpass the previous record of 13.2 million PDAs shipped in 2001. The study also found that Windows CE is the operating system of choice for business-minded road warriors. The underlying software accounted for 46 percent of worldwide shipments in the second quarter of 2005, followed by RIM with 23.2 percent of the PDA software shipped. PalmSource's 18.8 percent share rounded out the top three."</i><br /><br />This includes wireless devices but not smarthones, so the iPAQ 6315 is included, the Treo isn't. Go figure.

[UnLoGiC]

Bye bye PalmOS :bangin: :devilboy:

[Typhoon]

!! Win CE is the ultimate OS of choice and beats Palm by a mile. There is so much you can do very efficiently in Win CE. If Palm ever offers a specific functionality that Win CE does, Palm just never offers it efficiently...

[stevelam]

Are you really surprised that Palm whatever they call it now is dieing. For a start they dont even know their name :lol:

[Beavis]

Smartphones Up, Handhelds Down Globally In Q2

..."Handheld shipments fell in most regions, with North America down by 36%, while Latin America and Asia Pacific fell 12% and 21% respectively. In EMEA, however, handhelds are still showing growth, at 18% in Q2, as demand for devices with integrated GPS navigation hardware continues to rise."



http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=7983

[Ed Hansberry]

Smartphones Up, Handhelds Down Globally In Q2
Did you read the article Beavis? It addressed the difference between this report and the earlier report.

[surur]

Canalys provides the most reliable, easy to interpret numbers. They also indicate that "smart handheld devices" are increasing up to 2001 levels, but a look at this graph might be of interest to the palm affectionados.

http://www.canalys.com/pr/images/r2005041b.gif

http://www.canalys.com/pr/images/r2005071b.gif

WM is actually down 50 000 units from last quarter, while POS is up 20 000 units from last quarter.

I suspect though its just people waiting for WM5.0, while the Treo is maturing.

Surur

[sesummers]

Wouldn't it make sense to define a PDA something like this:

"A device that can exchange data with a desktop computer and run third-party application programs"?

Creating a distinction between "smart phones" and "wireless PDA's" that says a 6315 is one and a Treo is the other is just stupid, and people like Gartner should know that.

The distinction could be meaningful if one were analyizing trends within the PDA market- small screens vs. large screens, cellular radios vs. WiFi radios vs. No radios, etc, would all be interesting.

But to claim "PDA Sales are dropping" by claiming that anything with a cellular radio is a cell phone, or claim that they're rising slightly by making a totally arbitrary cutoff like this "Study" did, is just misleading.

What really counts is that the number of devices that let us keep personal data synchronized between our pockets and our desktops, and that let us decide what software we want to have available (or even write our own), is growing faster and faster, and Palm's share of it is dwindling.

THAT, and the fact that these "studies" keep changing the terminology so that they can spin the numbers any way they want, are the real stories.

[Ed Hansberry]

Creating a distinction between "smart phones" and "wireless PDA's" that says a 6315 is one and a Treo is the other is just stupid, and people like Gartner should know that.
I agree, but they aren't the only one that does that. Palm has been pretty adamant in calling the Treo a smartphone whereas all other full blown PDAs with phones built in are called PDAs. Palm seems to be the one with the marketing spin.

Why the market analysists don't ignore that and look at the device based on criteria similar to what you laid out though is beyone me.

[Foo Fighter]

I have a much simpler method for defining and distinguishing a PDA from Smartphone. Anything with a cellular radio inside is a Smartphone. That's it. End of story.

A Blackberry is a Smartphone. A Treo is a Smartphone. Any Pocket PC Phone edition model is a Smartphone.

No cellular radio? No Smartphone. That makes it a PDA. An Axim X50v is a PDA. An iPaq 4700 is a PDA. A Zire 72 is a PDA, etc., etc., etc.

[sesummers]

I have a much simpler method for defining and distinguishing a PDA from Smartphone. Anything with a cellular radio inside is a Smartphone. That's it. End of story.


My point wasn't that the method of differentiating between them is flawed- it was that the ACT of differentiating between them is flawed.

For purposes of analyzing the PDA market, differentiating between those with cellular radios and those without is useful. But I've maintained over the last few years, as the "analysts" have been claiming that the PDA market is "dying", that what's really happening is that more and more PDA buyers are buying models with cell phones built in, perhaps with smaller screens and built-in number pads.

Defining a "PDA" as a machine that doesn't have a cell phone built in is like defining a "Classic PDA" as one with a 160 pixel square monochrome display and 2MB of RAM. If you do that, you can easily claim that the "Classic PDA market is dying".

Well, yeah. But so what? It's the same as saying the "PDA" market is dying because people are buying smart phones instead. That's not news, it's "spin".

[Sven Johannsen]

We are going to get some interesting catagorizations coming up with things like the OQO. From the pictures it isn't far from PDA sized (4700, X50v) but it certainly does more than what is generally expected of a Personal Digital Assistant. When you look at the words though, why wouldn't it be a PDA? It's even a pretty Portable Digital Assistant.

[sesummers]

When you look at the words though, why wouldn't it be a PDA?

I agree- why wouldn't it be?

My definitions:

Desktop PC: big bulky thing with separate components- display, keyboard, mouse, brain-box, cables, etc.

Laptop PC: Compact, portable system with keyboard, pointing device, display, and brain-box integrated into one unit.

Pocket PC: VERY compact, pocket size system with a small display, either touch-screen or no pointing device, limited or no keyboard.

By these definitions, the OQO is effectively a Pocket PC even though it doesn't run a "Pocket PC" operating system. A Smart Phone is also a Pocket PC.

If the industry wanted to create a real differentiating factor between "Phones" and "PDAs", it could be the presence or not of a pointing device. Phones without them are pretty limited in the kinds of software they can run, and maybe that's a "real" difference, not just a question of the presence or absence of a "feature".

[twalk]

Gartner giving twisted numbers, crowing about WM being on top, and cheering the death of Palm? I'm shocked, I tell you, just shocked. ;-)

Gartner has been doing this for what, 6? 7 years?

Besides, Gartner is being really lazy here in just tracking shipments instead of sales. There's a lot of excess product in the channel right now, which makes shipment numbers about worthless.

The funniest part is where they blame the decline in PalmOS shipments on the " stagnant U.S. market". j2me cell phones and RIM have had massive increases in US sales. That doesn't sound very stagnant to me, that sounds like people switching platforms.


The Canalys numbers look pretty accurate. After I looked through the HP financial reports, the IDC ones also look pretty good.

Surur, you should probably focus more on the year to year sales differences than the quarter to quarter ones. A Q2Q drop in WM sales can easily be explained by seasonal sales differences. Q2 is usually the worst. Year to year, WM had nearly 50% growth, which is exceptional, at least until you compare it to Symbian. Palm lost about 180K Y2Y, which combined with the other info, fairly clearly shows that Palm is being hammered on the low-end.


Todd

[Ed Hansberry]

Gartner giving twisted numbers, crowing about WM being on top, and cheering the death of Palm? I'm shocked, I tell you, just shocked. ;-)

Gartner has been doing this for what, 6? 7 years?

Besides, Gartner is being really lazy here in just tracking shipments instead of sales. There's a lot of excess product in the channel right now, which makes shipment numbers about worthless.
Oh give me a break. I keep hearing that, mainly from apologists. Shipments are all that matters over the long haul. Yeah, you can stuff the pipeline for a given quarter, but not over the course of a year. Secondly, by tracking shipments out the OEM doors, you get 100% of the market, be it directly to large companies or to wholesalers and retailers, or even direct purchases by a consumer. By tracking point-of-sale data, you miss a lot and the numbers are skewed. This is what Palm used to do with IDC numbers. Retail only. Nevermind what Amazon, TigerDirect or HP sold directly.

[twalk]

Oh give me a break. I keep hearing that, mainly from apologists. Shipments are all that matters over the long haul. Yeah, you can stuff the pipeline for a given quarter, but not over the course of a year. Secondly, by tracking shipments out the OEM doors, you get 100% of the market, be it directly to large companies or to wholesalers and retailers, or even direct purchases by a consumer. By tracking point-of-sale data, you miss a lot and the numbers are skewed. This is what Palm used to do with IDC numbers. Retail only. Nevermind what Amazon, TigerDirect or HP sold directly.


No Ed, you give me a break. EVERY SINGLE ARTICLE that you post is designed to bash Palm. EVERY SINGLE ONE.

That's why you love the Gartner numbers. I guess if you succeed in making PPT into an echo chamber, you'll be happy.

Most of the companies in that industry twist statistics and analysis in order to tell people what they want to hear. It's what gets them paid. Gartner is among the worst.

Eample: Gartner is reporting 3.6M handhelds shipped Q2. IDC is reporting about 1.7M shipped. Even when you include the RIM numbers, Gartner is still about 1M higher.

Both numbers are shipped. Either one or both is flat out wrong. The other sources that I've looked at indicate that IDC is a lot closer to being right than Gartner is.

Another example: Gartner is reporting HP made $1.13B in 2004 on handhelds. Other places are reporting $886M. All I had to do was spend 2 minutes looking through HP's investor's info to figure out that Gartner made up that number.

Todd

[ADBrown]

I have a much simpler method for defining and distinguishing a PDA from Smartphone. Anything with a cellular radio inside is a Smartphone. That's it. End of story.

A Blackberry is a Smartphone. A Treo is a Smartphone. Any Pocket PC Phone edition model is a Smartphone.

No good, unless you're arguing that you can directly compare the phone-related features of a device like the Blue Angel or the Universal to a dedicated phone like the Treo or a WM Smartphone. Or compare one of the neutered, no-expansion 2 MB Series 60 "smartphones" with a Treo or Blue Angel.

[Ed Hansberry]

No Ed, you give me a break. EVERY SINGLE ARTICLE that you post is designed to bash Palm. EVERY SINGLE ONE.
No it isn't. I report on Pocket PCs specifically and in general, on the larger PDA world. When I see the competition doing something I like or dislike, I post on that. I haven't seen Palm do anything substantial that I like, certianly nothing that the Pocket PC can't do. Quite the contrast - the Palm world is melting down in a big way. Palm apologists are now not even trying to defend market share numbers and one leading apologist is saying "Hey, Apple can survive on 5% share. Perhaps Palm can too."

Many other sites that are platform specific totally ignore the competition. We don't. We are very open about our bias for the Windows Mobile platform and when I see the competition doing something I like/dislike as it compared to the PPC, I'll call it out.

Eample: Gartner is reporting 3.6M handhelds shipped Q2. IDC is reporting about 1.7M shipped. Even when you include the RIM numbers, Gartner is still about 1M higher.

Both numbers are shipped. Either one or both is flat out wrong. The other sources that I've looked at indicate that IDC is a lot closer to being right than Gartner is.

Well, that's odd, because two posts ago you said:Besides, Gartner is being really lazy here in just tracking shipments instead of sales. There's a lot of excess product in the channel right now, which makes shipment numbers about worthless.

But now you say IDC is showing shipments too. Which is it Todd? The IDC reports I am famailer with show end user sales, not shipments, and end user sales are worthless because they ignore too many outlets, especially direct from the manufacturer or from online sites. As I said, can OEMs stuff the channel? Yes, for a quarter by enticing retailers to send in larger POs with financial incentives, but it bites them the next quarter. You can't do it over a year because the retailers quit buying.

Furthermore, shipments are what are reported in the financial statements. From a reporting perspective, HP could care less what is in inventory at CompUSA. From a marketing and forecasting perspective they care because that impacts what they can sell in the future, but once it leaves HP's warehouse, that puppy is sold and booked on the financial statements. That is what Gartner seems to be tracking and that is what is relevant.

Another example: Gartner is reporting HP made $1.13B in 2004 on handhelds. Other places are reporting $886M. All I had to do was spend 2 minutes looking through HP's investor's info to figure out that Gartner made up that number.
I can't get to that number. The only segment info I can get is for the 9 months ended in April 2005. Where did you see that info at the handheld level, and where did you see Gartner reporting $1.13B for 2004? Define 2004? For the calender? HP doesn't report calendar data. They have quarters ending January, April, July and October, so any data you got from HP's site was Nov03-Oct04 or Feb04-Jan05.

[twalk]

No Ed, you give me a break. EVERY SINGLE ARTICLE that you post is designed to bash Palm. EVERY SINGLE ONE.
No it isn't. I report on Pocket PCs specifically and in general, on the larger PDA world. When I see the competition doing something I like or dislike, I post on that.

Ed, you're full of it. Nokia presents a million times greater threat than Palm does, and has even had a bad year, dropping about 6% marketshare. Yet you completely ignore them.

On the other hand, you positively gloat when writing bad things about Palm.


As for the rest of what you wrote, all you needed to do was 10 minutes of research. Just 10 minutes. And you refused to do even that. Why I'm even bothering to argue with someone who won't even do the bare minimum of checking is beyond me.

http://www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_133230_11.html
http://www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_120374_11.html
http://news.com.com/Handheld%20market%20still%20tanking,%20study%20says/2100-1041_3-5806721.html?tag=nefd.top

All of these links were *very* easy to find.

The 1st link shows Gartner's overly optimistic numbers. These numbers don't square with either the IDC or Canalys numbers.

The 3rd link is the cnet summary of the IDC report. Note that the report says *shipped*, just exactly as I stated in my previous post.

Even when you account for differences in what types of devices are counted, there's still a HUGE difference in the numbers.


The 2nd link shows Gartner's number of HP making $1.132B on PDAs in 2004. HP's investor reports show that their handheld group (not just PDA sales) never made more than $921M during any 12 month period in the last 18.

Where Gartner got that number from, I have no idea. The info from HP's site is the same info sent to the SEC. (And no, a 1 month shift isn't significant.)


To get to the HP investor info, go to: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/investor/ , and then to quarterly results, and then to one of the quarterly financial overviews, then to Segment / Business Unit Information.


Todd

[Ed Hansberry]

Ed, you're full of it. Nokia presents a million times greater threat than Palm does, and has even had a bad year, dropping about 6% marketshare. Yet you completely ignore them.
Yeah, I find Nokia boring. THey are strictly consumer oriented, not enterprise, at least from what I can see. They also don't have a thriving user/developer community to the extent WM/Palm has.

As for the rest of what you wrote, all you needed to do was 10 minutes of research. Just 10 minutes. And you refused to do even that. Why I'm even bothering to argue with someone who won't even do the bare minimum of checking is beyond me.
Sorry. I spent several minutes on Gartner's site and kept getting blocked by "enter your user ID here or register" dialogs and pages. Thanks for the links.

http://www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_133230_11.html
http://www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_120374_11.html
http://news.com.com/Handheld%20market%20still%20tanking,%20study%20says/2100-1041_3-5806721.html?tag=nefd.top

All of these links were *very* easy to find. However, this thread seems to have degraded into insults and insinuations of stupidity. I probably started that tone with my "give me a break" comment and I apologize for that. My point wasn't to argue about individual market points. The point of the thread was to give the last market data email I received from a reader and then complain that for some stupid reason they refuse to count the Treo as a device for these reports. To argue over reporting minutia just doesn't interest me. My only comment to you was you said IDC showed sales and Garntner showed shipments. I see you have now corrected that statement. All reports show the same trend.

Have a nice day Todd.

[surur]

The Gartner report talks about "end-user revenue", a common term, but one I could not find defined anywhere. I however believe it means how much each person paid for the device, vs how much revenue HP itself made by selling to an intermediary. End-user revenue would be more than the revenue the company makes itself, due to the retailers having to make a profit.

Maybe a financial analyst can put me straight.

Surur

[twalk]

Ed, I want to apologize for ripping into you so much. But I really don't like the ways in which companies like Gartner do business.

(pot-kettle-black, me&lt;->Gartner, you&lt;->Palm, just came to me, sigh.)

Todd

[Ed Hansberry]

Ed, I want to apologize for ripping into you so much. But I really don't like the ways in which companies like Gartner do business.

(pot-kettle-black, me&lt;->Gartner, you&lt;->Palm, just came to me, sigh.)

Oh the irony. :lol: Thanks.

[Steve Jordan]

I have a much simpler method for defining and distinguishing a PDA from Smartphone. Anything with a cellular radio inside is a Smartphone. That's it. End of story.

A Blackberry is a Smartphone. A Treo is a Smartphone. Any Pocket PC Phone edition model is a Smartphone.

No good, unless you're arguing that you can directly compare the phone-related features of a device like the Blue Angel or the Universal to a dedicated phone like the Treo or a WM Smartphone. Or compare one of the neutered, no-expansion 2 MB Series 60 "smartphones" with a Treo or Blue Angel.

I agree with F.F. here. Maybe the devices you mention aren't exactly the same configuration, but if it's a cellphone with (understood to be) PDA functions, it's a smartphone to me. Any other definitions just seem like quibbling.

But of course, the whole point of the gartner numbers IS quibbling. In a major way, they are like saying "the 2004 Hondas are being outsold by the 2005 Hondas." Smartphones are the natural next step after PDAs and cellphones. Of course they're going to outsell their precursers at some point.