Thursday, January 20, 2005
Pocket Factory Predictions For 2005
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "ARTICLE" @ 08:00 AM
http://www.pocketfactory.com/archives/2005/01/predictions_for_1.php
"The PDA market continues its onward declining trend. What’s happening to cause this trend is not just the migration from PDAs to Smartphones; but also the fact that there are few revue opportunities left in this market. Simply put; you can't make money selling handhelds. Competition and declining price expectations have forced vendors to cut margins to the bone. And the only way to make money on PDAs is to sell in massive volumes; which is never going to happen considering PDAs are a niche product category. If the handheld market had the scale and robustness of the mobile phone sector, everyone would be rolling in profit. Not so."
A bit doom and gloomish. In my opinion, PDAs were never going to take over any market in a pure PDA form. It was always about connectivity. The number one reason I purchased a Nino 320 many years ago was it had a tiny modem you could clip to the bottom. :D The PDA utility is firmly entrenched in phones now and the need or usefulness of a disconnected PDA is rapidly approaching zero, but you'll be hard pressed to find any phone (carrier freebies excepted) that don't have the core PDA functionality that made the original Palm Pilot such a hit and many phones have much more. I don't know what my iMATE PDA2K is. Is it a phone? Is it a PDA? Who cares? Whatever it is, it is invaluable to me. Perhaps it is all a game in semantics. In 4 years, the PDA will be declared dead yet there won't be a single mobile device being sold that can't rival today's functionality.
"The PDA market continues its onward declining trend. What’s happening to cause this trend is not just the migration from PDAs to Smartphones; but also the fact that there are few revue opportunities left in this market. Simply put; you can't make money selling handhelds. Competition and declining price expectations have forced vendors to cut margins to the bone. And the only way to make money on PDAs is to sell in massive volumes; which is never going to happen considering PDAs are a niche product category. If the handheld market had the scale and robustness of the mobile phone sector, everyone would be rolling in profit. Not so."
A bit doom and gloomish. In my opinion, PDAs were never going to take over any market in a pure PDA form. It was always about connectivity. The number one reason I purchased a Nino 320 many years ago was it had a tiny modem you could clip to the bottom. :D The PDA utility is firmly entrenched in phones now and the need or usefulness of a disconnected PDA is rapidly approaching zero, but you'll be hard pressed to find any phone (carrier freebies excepted) that don't have the core PDA functionality that made the original Palm Pilot such a hit and many phones have much more. I don't know what my iMATE PDA2K is. Is it a phone? Is it a PDA? Who cares? Whatever it is, it is invaluable to me. Perhaps it is all a game in semantics. In 4 years, the PDA will be declared dead yet there won't be a single mobile device being sold that can't rival today's functionality.
