PDA Market Declines 16.7% in 2005

Telecom News Editorials Reports Glossary

5:30 am on February 3, 2006 | Category: Business, Mobile Devices, PDAs

Market research agency, IDC, has released a report showing a 16.7% decline in the market for PDAs during the past year. In total, 7.5 million of the handheld devices were shipped in 2005, compared to 9.1 million units in 2004.

IDC analyst, Ramon Llamas, comments that the PDA market has been under “immense pressure” in the past couple of years from converged mobile devices and smartphones with built-in handheld computing functions.

PDAs with advanced features, however, such as Wi-Fi, GPS, and multimedia capabilities, still have a slight edge, showing a much smaller decline than products that don’t have these added extras.

Palm, HP, and Dell remain the top three players in the PDA industry, with market shares of 45.6%, 20.8%, and 8.0%, respectively. All three have seen a decline in overall shipments, especially HP, which has suffered a wounding decrease of over 30%.