Windows Phone Thoughts: Casio leaves the Pocket PC market in the US

According to a blog at Jeff Kirvin's Writing On Your Palm Casio is discontinuing their E series Pocket PC in the United States. It is a shame too. Casio was so close to getting it right but just never developed that killer PDA. The E-115/125 was the ultimate in quality control, had a fantastic screen and built in Compact Flash but was simply too large to be considered pocketable by most people. The E-200 got the StrongARM processor and added Secure Digital to the package, but was plagued with quality control problems and its style was... uhm... unique. As a result, Casio has recently been lumped in the "other" category of most market share reports as its market share declined below numbers most industry watchers cared about.

Instead they are going to continue to push their BE series devices here, which run Windows CE but not Pocket PC, which is a strategy I just don't get. I have been a fan of Casio's pre-E200 quality and am a happy owner of the EM-500, a beautifully put together device. Again though, the 16MB limit and no Compact Flash expansion possibilities really limited its usefulness. Casio has just never been able to put all of the pieces together. They insisted on going their own way with the Casio Zoomer abandoning their partnership with Jeff Hawkins rather than make the sleek Palm Pilot.

Casio will continue to sell some sort of Pocket PC in Japan. Source: Foo Fighter