Worldwide PDA sales have plummeted an astonishing 43.5%, quarter-on-quarter, over the last year, prompting the withdrawal from the market of Dell and Fujitsu-Siemens. Barely a million PDAs were sold in the quarter (which begs the question, who the hell is still buying the things?), while sales of smartphones, S60-based handsets, and similarly converged devices boomed.
For Palm, which is the world’s number one PDA maker (its Tungsten E2 is shown right), this brings added pressure to its smartphone division. Still in a state of flux after the company’s recent acquisition by Elevation Partners, Palm needs its next wave of handsets to be killer products.
Sadly, recent shots of the new Treo show that — at least in industrial design terms — Palm has a long way to go before it can compete with Apple’s iPhone, most of Nokia’s Nseries, and pretty much anything coming out of Sony Ericsson. Where Palm can win through is in delivering a strong user interface and OS, an area in which it has often lead the way. Let’s hope it has more exciting products up its sleeve than the Foleo, that’s for sure.
(Via Ars Technica)
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