Monday, November 15, 2004

More bad news for the Palm OS…

but good news for PocketBuilder. A recently released study shows that the Microsoft OS has moved into the market share leading position for PDA, with 48.1 percent of worldwide shipments for new units. While Windows moved to 41.2 percent a year ago to 48.1 percent this year, the Palm OS moved from 46.9 percent down to 29.8 percent. This is during a time when the worldwide shipment of PDAs increased by 13.6 percent.

The article also notes that the SmartPhone market is increasing significantly faster than the PDA market, and that the current market leading OS in that space is Symbian. I expect that to change though, much as Microsoft has overtaken Palm in the PDA space. One of the few times you'll find me rooting for Microsoft....

Monday, November 01, 2004

More on the demise of the PDA…

More evidence of the shift from PDAs to the smartphone platform: Zelos Group and other take on the IDC report.

The SmartPhone boom may also be indicated by the renewed interest in that platform as a target for internet based apps. Yahoo has just introduced mobile versions of Yahoo Search and Yahoo Local, responding to Google's support for the mobile platform, particularly their recent introduction of Google SMS.

And as evidence of the growing support for the Windows Mobile platform for the smartphone, there are reports that palmOne may introduce a Pocket PC flavored Treo, which didn't do much to help out the share price of it's corporate sibling PalmSource.

While you may not have a decent keyboard on your smartphone, they do have a mouse for them now.

The down side is that if your phone is from Kyocera you might want to watch out for this. One more good reason to use a hands-free device: to keep you cell-phone from exploding in your ear.