News

Symbian "leads in converged market" ahead of MS, Linux. And Palm? Dead?

According to a report (on sale from today) from IDC, "In 2004, for the first time in history, more pen-based handheld devices (PDAs) featuring Microsoft Windows Mobile (Pocket PC and Windows CE) shipped globally than those featuring the Palm OS, yet the PDA market continues to fade."

The report then goes on to say that the leader is Symbian, with MS as number two, and Linux as number three - without mentioning Palm.

The report doesn't spell it out: but when it says that Windows has overtaken Palm, it would appear that Linux has overtaken Palm, as well.

"Symbian dominates the converged mobile device operating system market with a 55.9% share in 2004. Symbian's share of this market is expected to grow to nearly 60% in 2009. Microsoft Windows Mobile platforms had 12.7% of the market in 2004, with continued growth to 17.3% of the market in 2009. Linux had an 11.3% share in 2004 and is expected to capture nearly 17% of the market in 2009," says the release.

Quick juggling of figures on an ordinary calculator shows that IDC expects the virtual eclipse of Palm OS by 2009 - less than three years in the future. Adding 60% plus 17.3% plus 17% totals 94.3% - leaving 5.7% for "others" including Palm.

Robert Carnegie writes:

I thought I heard Palm is converting to Linux, so aren't they still in the game?

But it hasn't been going well. It's a man's job competing with Microsoft, and you can't afford to coast. Microsoft products make a lot of people cross for all sorts of reasons, not least a do-it-our-way-or-not-at-all design (skins notwithstanding), wilful incompatibility, Bombastic Feature Nomenclature (for, for instance, what normal people call "printing") that disguises when you're just getting last year's Pompous Taxonomy of Capabilities in a different colour - oh god, I've started. And they're addicted, like phone companies, to ever-greater Revenue Per User, which means draining the customer's wallet instead of satisfying his appetites. They don't care what you want; they know what they want - our money - and that's what it's about. Of course every business wants customers' money but most of them give something back in return, like appreciation.

But it's like Godzilla, you have to move fast to stay ahead or else they step on you and crush you into the ground. I am not sure that Palm stayed ahead.

Palm had an advantage over Microsoft products that demanded lots and lots of processor, RAM, and battery power for similar or less functionality with Windows branding (the idiocy of SPOT), never mind that the tools are in fact not Windows. Battery hasn't improved immensely in personal devices, but processor and RAM have. So a lot of Palm's initial advantage evaporated. This is when they should have been inventing new advantages.

(Incidentally, I run a Palm Zire as a lanyard clock as well as PDA, using a screensaver, so I have to charge it every night anyway because it's never switched off.)

One such is a large range of applications, and powertoys - but Palm hasn't done well at bringing developers along. Successive models are successively incompatible.

A separate problem, perhaps, is users' willingness to pay real money for very small program files. Never mind that a PC application can cost more than the PC...

Then people want phones, so battery life is eaten that way anyway - and people want multimedia so a low-power processor doesn't cut it (unless it's an ASIC for multimedia). So Palm's advantage - cheap device with long battery life - gets kicked even harder.

I do think that anyone who wants a PDA and wants a phone will prefer a single-unit smartphone (unless wearing a microwave transmitter worries you), so clearly that was the way to move - that should be the main product, and PDA-only customers should get the same unit with phone parts removed. That and the watch - did that finally limp out this year? A PDA watch would have blown MS out of the water, even if most customers bought it as accessory to their regular PDA. Microsoft watches are pathetic; worse - they're insulting. But the Palm watch turned into vapourware. Now, who wants to know?

And Linux is the enemy of every non-Linux company. The answer is to embrace it - and if you're Microsoft then you do other things, but for the rest of us, the thing is to make it work /for/ you.

And Microsoft owns the desktop, of course - or ninety per cent - so a Palm device has to negotiate with the enemy whenever it's docked. I don't think Microsoft overlooked that opportunity.

The IDC announcement - press release