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Hands Down, Palm is Now Number Two
jamesl writes "InformationWeek reports that the number one PDA operating system now comes from Redmond, 48.1% last quarter (41.2% a year ago) compared to 29.8% (46.9% last year) for PalmSource. The big gainer was RIM, up to 19.8% from 4.9%. Linux ... a valient 0.9%, off slightly from last years' 1.9%.
The article has some thoughts about where the market is going with phones taking on more PDA functions."
I think it was from the stagnation of palm. They had the number one spot for so long they rarely made any large changes to their os. When Microsoft came out with their os for mobile devices palm tried to catch up and wasnt able to
With dirt-cheap-to-make phones taking over the (simple) functions of PDAs, I can't see the market for pure PDAs improving much. Honestly, I always found a 400$ device too costly to replace my paper address/notebook. But its a different thing altogether if they can offer me the functionality on my phone, for just about the same price.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
I'd quote from the linked article but it seems to be slashdotted so I'll quote from an infosync article:
http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/5526.html
"It should be noted that these percentages apply only to the handheld market, which for the purposes of this study excludes the widely-popular palmOne Treo 600. The Treo line has had a long history of reclassification, and often bounces back and forth between different market categories in different studies."
Gartner has had a long history of producing studies that suggest Palm is losing to Microsoft. Their latest tactic seems to be to exclude the best selling Palm product from their studies.
http://nyamenation.org/
I think the pocketpc vs palm battle has reached a tipping point. At this stage people will start to think of buying into an OS with a future, which will lead to accelerating movement away from Palm OS. Think of Netscape VS IE. The remarkable think is that in this case it occurred without any underhanded tactics from MS, and even quite lacklustre support. The main advantage has been the assumption that hardware will catch up with OS demands, while Palm aways tried to live within hardware limitations, resulting in limited product, optimized for 33Mhz.
Thank God for Moore's Law
Surur
Information is the location of things. Computation is moving things around.
Article seems to be /.ed so:
j html?articleID=52601413
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Microsoft Seizes PDA Market Lead From PalmSource
Microsoft led the market in the third quarter for operating systems used in personal digital assistants, surpassing for the first time the Palm OS that dominated the handheld-computer segment for years.
By Antone Gonsalves, TechWeb, InformationWeek
Nov. 12, 2004
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.
Microsoft Corp. led the market in the third quarter for operating systems used in personal digital assistants, surpassing for the first time the Palm OS that dominated the handheld-computer segment for years.
The Redmond, Wash., company shipped 1.38 million units of Windows CE in the quarter ended Sept. 30, accounting for 48.1 percent of the market, researcher Gartner Inc. said Friday. PalmSource trailed far behind with 850,821 units, or 29.8 percent of the market.
During the same period a year ago, PalmSource shipped 1.2 million units, 46.9 percent of the market, compared with Microsoft's 1.04 million units, or 41.2 percent.
The switch was not a surprise, given PalmSource's focus on supplying an OS for advanced cellular phones, called "smartphones," that contain many of the same features as PDAs, such as contact lists, personal calendars and email. PalmSource's Palm OS is used in smartphones from PalmOne Inc. and Kyocera Wireless Corp.
"They've abdicated their leadership in the PDA market in order to become a significant player in the smartphone market," Gartner analyst Todd Kort said of PalmSource.
The market's No. 3 operating system is from Research In Motion Ltd, which supplies the OS for its own BlackBerry PDA, a device that's popular among businesspeople. OS shipments increased more than 350 percent in the quarter to 565,000 units from 123,775 a year ago. RIM's market share rose to 19.8 percent from 4.9 percent.
Linux was the No. 4 operating system, but its market share dropped to 0.9 percent from 1.9 percent a year ago.
Driven by RIM's success with the Blackberry, the overall PDA hardware market increased in the quarter 13.6 percent to 2.86 million units from 2.52 million units a year ago, according to Gartner. The same driver is expected to account for most of a 4 percent increase for the year to about 12 million units.
Given the PDA market trends, it makes sense for PalmSource to switch its marketing and research and development focus to smartphones. Shipments of the advanced cellular phones are increasing rapidly at the expense of the PDA market, which has been slipping steadily, Kort said. In addition, smartphones have higher profit margins.
"(PalmSource) could fight a little harder, but it's probably smarter to let (market share) slip and put more of the resources on smartphones," Kort said.
RIM's Blackberry is expected to keep the PDA market growing through the first half of next year, Gartner said. In the second half, however, sales are expected to slow, and the overall market is forecast to post a decline for all of 2005.
PDA sales, however, are expected to eventually stabilize within a mature market that's becoming increasingly dependent on businesspeople. Companies are expected to account for 40 percent of sales this year, compared with 29 percent in 2003, according to Gartner.
While consumers can get enough of the PDA's capabilities in a cellular phone, business executives and sales people will prefer the PDA's larger screen for calling up business documents and email attachments while on the road, Kort said.
PalmOne, the largest user of the Palm OS, led the PDA hardware market, but continued to lose market share to other vendors as it too shifted focus to smartphones. PalmOne's share slipped to 26.2 percent from 34.3 percent a year ago.
No. 2 Hewlett-Packard Co. increased market share to 24.2 percent from 23 percent, followed by RIM, which posted a huge jump to 19.8 percent from 4.9 percent. Rounding out the top five were Dell Inc., 6.5 percent from 5.4 percent; and Symbol Technologies Inc., 2.2 percent from 2.9 percent.
PocketPCs are more versatile. I know this and don't even own one.
Meanwhile, Palm has tried more to generate cash than generate a strategy that makes their product diverse enough to work like an operating system, and not like an appliance with canned tasks.
I've watched them cut their market support to where essentially only Windows is supported. Not the best plan without something better to offer. It's the same battle that MP3 player makers have against Apple--they can't offer much better since they don't have a better online music interface to match the iPod's simple operation.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
. . . 'cuz I love my Zaurus too, but 1.9% to .9% is not "off slightly". Its a shellacing.
trustedworlds.net - gaming, security, and the gunk that lives in between
They're still releasing devices with PalmOS 5 which is the saddest apology for an operating system I have seen. Writing PalmOS GUI code is hard - there are so many legacy features you need to check for and deal with. It's clear that the whole thing has just accreted without planning over the years. The current schizophrenia between 68000 and ARM is a nightmare with the worse endianness horrors you've ever seen. I won't even mention proper OS features like memory management, multi-threading and so on.
Customers have been begging for proper wireless support on Palms for a long time and Palm have failed to deliver. A device, today, without at least 802.11b, is a dinosaur before it's born. What the hell are the Palm engineers doing over there?
The software that delivers with the Palm is a little pathetic. Not even a file browser. And main memory has a completely flat file hierarchy so that even with a file browser it's hard to find what you want. No word processor (well, there's an awful 3rd party thing).
It's no surprise they're losing the war. But it needn't have been like this. They had the advantage. And they simply sat on their laurels.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I think there's a huge segment of the handheld users that are project managers, managers, analysts, etc. These people depend on (because of market penetration) Microsoft products such as Excel, Word, Project, and Outlook.
It would make sense that the the most popular "take with you" version of these would be on a PocketPC running Microsoft CE.
If Palm had wanted to remain on the top, they'd have had to offer *seamless* integration with these products, but how can they when they're competing with the company that MAKES them?
This is the a great example of how a monopoly can be used to extend into another market via a "one-off" mechanism.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
RIM Blackberry is strong, but IMHO that's only due to 2 things:
- a keyboard
- an easy to use system
- unmetered email
Ie. it tries to serve customers instead of thinking about milking them dry. Not that it's not they long term goal (maybe) but they provide a decent service for a decent fee.
But that's just a functionnality-based success. Any WinCE, Palm or Zaurus call plan which would offer the same functionnality would quickly become as big. Time to think about new functions too - say unmetered instant messenging (like SMS but free!)
Note to cell phone operators : stop thinking about milking your customers dry. Start thinking about offering services, such as voip roaming (ie if my cellphone finds a wifi network, use sipphone instead of $lousy_gsm_provider - especially when roaming abroad !)
This is IMHO the key to success. Then whatever hardware or operating system that goes along, if it is not too lousy, will grow.
The Zaurus 6000 could have become big. The user interface needed only minor tweaking. If only it had had GSM built it (smartphone like) + some good voip software + a call plan where email and instant messenging would have been free...
The market is lagging not because of lack of functionnality or technical capabiliies (GPRS makes possible to receive calls at the same time you have a data connection on a multiplex-capable GSM phone) but only because a shared monopoly between shitty operators prevent this innovation from appearing. "what if it eats my profits?" is wrong spririt. With the same mentality horseless carriage ie cars would have never existed. "it will eat every competitor alive and grow my market share and thus skyrocket my profits" is right.
Where's entrepreunership and risk taking? I just see deep-coma business !
That's free advice from a disgruntled french cellphone customer.
why would you think a PDA wouldn't need to multitask? I want a PDA that I can leave my mp3s playing in the background while i compose a document or spreadsheet. I don't want the whole device to freeze while it checks my mail.
Storage also is not an issue anymore, since flash memory prices have dropped so much it's like a $5 difference between including 64MB and 256MB.
If you're just looking for something to store contacts and text files, you can get a brand new Sharp YO-P20 Handheld Organizer for about $20. If you want a small, portable computer that will allow you to do most of your desktop functions quickly and relatively cheaply, buy an IPaQ or Dell Axim.
Getting a PDA only for storing contacts is WAY overkill.
Note: I'm a Dell Axim owner. There's just something cool about being able to be outside mowing the lawn while streaming mp3s over 802.11 to a small device in my pocket.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Remember smartphones, the growing market segment (unlike the shrinking PDA segment)?
p ?r eport_id=222287&t=e&cat_id=20
4
"2003 was a breakout year for mobile operating system vendor Symbian Software, which shipped 6.67 million operating systems worldwide--an 88 percent market share of advanced OS-based handset sales. Before 2003, the Symbian OS was resident on only five handset models--all but one from Nokia. At the end of 2003, the number of Symbianbased handsets remained modest, at 11 models from four vendors, with five more scheduled for launch in the first quarter of 2004."
http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reportinfo.as
http://www.mobilemonday.net/mm/story.php?id=388
This one Palm did to themselves. Palm had half a dozen years to turn PalmOS into a modern, reliable 32bit operating system, instead they are still shipping handhelds that emulate bits and pieces of an old 68k design, don't multitask properly, and make it hard allocate more than 64k at a time. Apparently, PalmOS 6 has been released, but neither PalmOne nor Sony are even bothering to make handhelds with it; it's too little too late. The only thing that has kept the platform alive is the fact that there are lots of good applications for it and that kept the original GUI more or less intact.
All Microsoft had to do is show up to the party. WinCE isn't a great operating system, but it's a lot better than PalmOS. The thing that has been holding PocketPC back is its awful UI.
My hope would be that PalmOne (the hardware part of Palm) explores some new ideas: Symbian is a great system they could ship right away, or they could adopt one of the Linux-based PDA environments and port a PalmOS emulation layer to that to run all the Palm legacy applications.
I would have to say that PalmOne deserves whatever happens to them. Until the release of the T5 I was a die-hard Palm OS fan, owning now less than six different Palm devices over the years (starting with the original Palm Pilot.) However when PalmOne released the T5 it was such a slap in the face to all of their customers that I couldn't believe that a company could be so stupid. For the T5 is essentially a T3, execpt with some more memory. And no Wi-fi. And no Cobalt. And did I mention no Wi-fi? The day after PalmOne released the T5 (October 4) I decided against upgrading my Treo 600 to a Treo 650 (which has a meagre 32mb of ram and NO WI-FI) and instead bought a Dell Axim x30. It has Wi-fi, a exteremly fast processor (624mhZ) and tons of memory. While I find the OS unstable, I now see how much the PalmOS has limited me.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
While this is bad news for Palm, it's not so bad in that this really just reflects their current strategy: stay in the PDA business, but don't break the bank on it. They believe convergent devices are a huge part of their future (they're already selling 2 different treo models, and are definitely going to continue making more), and who's to blame them? Nowadays, I don't want to carry two devices when I can only carry one. If bluetooth had taken off more in US cellphones (thank you very much Verizon) then we might be seeing a different picture, but as it is, the PDA market is considered dead and/or stagnant.
2 98
"A decline in Palm OS shipments was expected in the third quarter of 2004, but not of this magnitude," Mr. Kort said. "The company is pouring the vast majority of its resources into its smartphone business. A reduction in the number of PDA models palmOne offers is expected in 2005."
Most certainly bad for Palm, but not quite a deathknell. Another two aspects of trickery in this report: this only includes numbers of units *shipped,* not numbers of units *sold.* There is indeed a difference. I'm sure that PalmOne sold less devices in this quarter, but I'm pretty sure these numbers don't include much in the way of the new T5 (meaning it's likely people were still waiting to see what new stuff Palm would have) and who's to say that there isn't a backlog of iPaqs sitting in some warehouse somewhere, waiting to be sold?
Link to another article with the same numbers: http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=7
PalmOS is nowhere near as clunky as Windows CE.
For one thing, PalmOS has got a much simpler and more elegant user interface than its rival (Why the hell would anyone think that a desktop metaphor is suitable for a PDA?) and for another it's far faster than it too.
When I'm looking up an address or want to enter a quick note then I don't want to have to navigate through a menu system to get there first and wait while everything happens.
The key advantage PocketPCs have over Palms is the Microsoft factor: just as it has with other markets (eg, web browsers), Microsoft has leveraged its dominance in one market (desktop OS) to achieve success in another.
To suggest that PocketPCs are intrinsically superior to equivalent Palm models is hilarious.
If I were a tad more paranoid, I'd suggest that your comment and one or two others like it I've seen posted about this story were classic cases of astroturfing.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Could the dive in Linux PDA adoption be related to the failure of the Zaurus line and Sharp's nonexistent attempts to promote it?
the =zaurus line is far from a failure, it still makes the newest PocketPC machine look like a joke.
Sharp made the decision that the american public are not smart enough to handle their Zaurus and therefore only sell it in Japan where it is a raging hit.
Before you moderators start frothing and aiming for that overrated and flamebait button, this is a known fact with all products designed in Japan. Many MANY products never get here because they are convinced that the product is too difficult for an american to use/play/own.
The BEST vcr I ever owned is a Minidv/DVCAM/SVHS combo from SONY that you have to either buy in jap[an or have a friend ship to you, and youy can not find any information about outside Japan.
If the Zaurus line, expically the clamshell designs were sold here and actively marketed they would sell very well.... IF they were dumbed down a bit.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
For many Slashdotters, the palm is still their one and only.
I know god exists. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.
And I just bought a Palm, since the iPod only displays stuff -- I need to input, too. You have no idea how badly I wish there was a way to do input on the iPod (while still using Apple's software -- Linux doesn't count)!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz