Windows Mobile passes Palm in PDA sales
posted November 14th 2004 3:01PM
With PDA sales essentially flat, we're practically at the point where they're squabbling over a dead carcass of a market, but Microsoft just swiped the title of most popular PDA operating system away PalmSource. A full 48.1% of all non-smartphone PDAs sold in the third quarter of this year run on some flavor of Windows CE (mainly the Pocket PC operating system), while Palm-powered PDAs accounted for only 29.8% of sales, a pretty significant decline from the same period last year. Windows Mobile and Palm are still dwarfed by Symbian when it comes to the ever more important market for smartphones, but any way you slice it, the Palm OS is hurting, with Sony killing their Palm-powered line of Clie handhelds everywhere except Japan, and former conjoined twin palmOne supposedly flirting with a Windows Mobile version of the Treo.
I see two major problems with this survey: one, It doesn't count the Treo 600, by far P1's most popular device. While it does have a cellular component it is most definitely a PDA. Two, it doesn't consider people who buy a pda running PPC and then install a distrobution of Linux over it.
Palm had the potential to continue to hold the lead, but there lack of vision and products with mediocre features has cost them the title. Maybe palm's ceo is a Microsoft insurgent that was put in place to deliberatly run palm out of business because some of palm's decisions are just plain stupid. IE not including built in WIFI on high-end device when all high-end Windows Mobile devices includes wifi, bluetooth etc.
Palm had the potential to continue to hold the lead, but there lack of vision and products with mediocre features has cost them the title. Maybe palm's ceo is a Microsoft insurgent that was put in place to deliberatly run palm out of business because some of palm's decisions are just plain stupid. IE not including built in WIFI on high-end device when all high-end Windows Mobile devices includes wifi, bluetooth etc.
It figures. I remember not long ago when us Palm users had a lot to get excited about. Between Palm and Sony, you could expect sometimes several new models in a year. Now, after the Pa1mOne / palmSource split and the exit of Sony, there's not much to talk about anymore. Innovation is slow. Compared to PPC's, prices for Palms are higher but offer less key features. And no one, not even Pa1mOne, wants to commit to OS 6.
Looks like the plan is to let their regular PDA's die a slow death and just focus on Smartphones like the Treo...just like Jeff Hawkins wanted to do with Handspring. And I guess Palm no longer wants to be the all around platform it once wanted to be. Seems to me that they're banking their future on portable productivity with Treo. Portable gaming will go to Sony PSP or Nintendo. Portable multimedia will go to iPod and the like.
The reall kill is the multitask. If they dotn get OS6 out quicker than 2006, Palm1 and Palmsource will suffer as Netscape did. You know THEY know they are screwed.
As for the survey counting how many people replace their PPC OS with a linx distro - IM quicte sure thats a miniscule percetage.
Apart from the Treo 600, PalmOS hasn't had a really successful new device in years.
They've had some that were interesting, but they've also had a lot of problems: Bad sound, the slider, problems with the sync ports, general fragileness and bulk.
The lack of universal driver support for their WIFI cards, along with the fact that the cards got to market two years late is also really hurting them.
Don't forget that the Palm devices have been increasingly difficult to install on PCs, and requiring users to own/install more than one application in order for Palm devices to synch with Outlook is unattractive to most.
Regardless of who installs what on what device, the sales of the actual devices supporting the actual OS's are what is triggering the numbers. Last I checked, most PPC devices that originally offered Linux as an alternative were being pulled. Even in the real world, Linux is only making up like 1% of all sales.
Also realize that Palm has even stepped away from its own, successful OS, only to mimic PPC 2002 and 2003. Even if Palm OS doesn't go away, in 5 years you won't be able to tell the difference between the two.