Windows CEPDAs capture APac market: Gartner

Microsoft Windows CEPDAs are taking a bigger share of a struggling APac

market, says research and analyst firm Gartner. It revealed that Windows CE PDAs

showed strong growth of 41 percent year-on-year, capturing 24 percent of the

market.

However, while the PDA market grew eight percent year-on-year with a total of

534,956 units shipped, sales declined four percent from the previous quarter.

While APac accounted for 20 percent of worldwide PDA shipments in the second

quarter of 2002, Gartner says that even with an eight percent growth, the region’s

PDA market is still being consistently challenged by worldwide economic woes.

The PDA market in China declined 12 percent year-over-year and six percent

over the previous quarter. Gartner says China has been exhibiting growth

challenges as the low end of the PDA market is saturated, leaving buyers with no

new compelling reason to upgrade.

"The high end is besieged with few new applications and high

prices," said Lillian Tay, Senior Analyst, Gartner Dataquest Hardware

Platforms group. "Smaller vendors such as Founder and Hisense have

retreated from the market. Legend, however, gained traction with the Tianji

XP100, a multimedia Pocket PC PDA that brings new functionality to PDAs that are

used mainly as glorified organizers."

According to Gartner, corporate PDA purchases continue to be made cautiously,

but increasing deployment has been observed in sales automation, distribution

and healthcare. There are more requests for quotes, but purchases tend to be for

pilot implementations.

"Potential buyers of Palm PDAs are adopting a wait-and-see attitude,

because new product offerings based on Palm OS 5 and new ARM-based processors

are expected to be released in the third quarter 2002."

According to Gartner, combined HP/Compaq PDA unit shipments this quarter also

surpassed that of Palm, making HP the No. 2 vendor in APac, just behind Hi-Tech

Wealth, further boosting the Microsoft Windows CE’s overall market share in

the region.