Handheld device market in steep decline

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Just a month after Dell announced it was killing off its line of Windows-based handheld devices, findings by analyst IDC confirm that the overall handheld PC market is in big trouble.

It seems that more and more of us are turning away from PDA-type devices in favour of smartphones and small form-factor laptops, as the worldwide handheld device market has seen its thirteenth consecutive quarter of decline. According to data from IDC, vendors shipped just over 900 000 handheld devices in the first quarter of 2007 - 36.3 per cent less than the previous quarter and 40.6 per cent less than this time last year.

Even Palm, the long-term market leader in the PDA arena, is seeing its sales fall dramatically despite expanding its range with Windows-based devices as well as Palm OS-based ones.

It seems that consumer trends are veering more towards converged mobile devices, which are capable of telephony as well as data management and synchronisation with desktops or laptops.

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