Windows Phone Thoughts: Convergence: What's Really Happening Out There?

"There appears to be little that can help the traditional PDA in its battle against networked handheld devices such as cellphones, smartphones and PDAs with cellphone functionality. IDC reports that 5.5 million handhelds shipped during 2006, which is still a sizable market, but considerably less than the segment's performance from a few years ago. The current number is down 28.5% from 2005 (7.5 million units), which was down almost 18% from 2004 (9.1 million units). The market peaked in 2001 with a volume of 13.1 million units, which was up 22% from 10.7 million units in 2000."

If you've voted or commented in Lex's poll on convergence, here's some ammunition for you - IDC reports that volume shipments of non-converged handhelds in 2006 was less than half the level it was in 2001 (read the original press statement here). In a separate contrasting report, Gartner Inc estimated that volume shipment of all PDAs rose instead by 18.4% in 2006 to 17.7 million units :?. There's some controversy however over Gartner's and IDC's classification of what constitutes a PDA (Gartner for example doesn't include either RIM's Blackberry Pearl nor Palm's Treo 750, and IDC leaves out RIM entirely). Gartner does note that 60% of their tally includes PDAs with cellular capabilities, up from 47% in 2005 (thus roughly corresponding with the numbers in IDC's report), and that Windows Mobile has a 56.1% market share - what's clear is that, as you might expect, convergence is on the rise and that Windows Mobile is a big part of that. You can read up analysis on Gartner's report here and here.

To avoid thread fragmentation, I'd appreciate it if any comments on this post be posted in Lex's original thread, thanks!