A Gartner Research study of July-September sales data found that Microsoft’s mobile OS outsold Palm’s. During that period, Microsoft’s OS accounted for 48.1% of worldwide shipments of PDAs, up from 41.2% the previous year. Palm’s share dropped to 29.8% in Q3 2004 from 46.9%. The BlackBerry quadrupled its market share in twelve months to 19.8% from 4.9%.
Time to port ReactOS to the Xscale and SH4 as it seems like the world loves to develop for a Win32 like OS.
CNET Asia is running a story according to which PalmOne would use either Windows or Linux in their future offerings. I wonder why Palm ever bought BeOS in the first place ?
Palm doesn’t support their own products nearly as much as they could. For example, the Tungsten E and Treo 600 both support SDIO cards, but Palm’s own Bluetooth SDIO card won’t work in either of these two PDA’s due to a lack of driver support. (I chose the Tungsten E over the more expensive Tungsten 3 thinking I could just upgrade later, so I’m kind of pissed at Palm.)
I actually see two big stories in this article. That Windows CE keeps capturing more market share is a non-event. I think MS has shown than when it decides to go after a market, it eventually captures it, it is only a matter of how long it takes.
So, I guess Palm losing market share was inevitable; however what I found even more surprising is that Linux seems to be completely fizzling out in this market. It’s market share is less than half what it was a year ago, and it was already a tiny 1.9% then! I am not sure what the reason for this is, I know that Sharp recently pulled its Zaurus line from the US due to lack of demand…which is what I guess surprises me: the lack of demand. Any thoughts on that?
On the Symbian sides, there have been an increase of 201% in the number of phones shipped by that OS this year:
http://www.newlc.com/article.php3?id_article=599
As PDA and Phone are merging, will we see MS and Symbian fighting for domination of the market ?
Linux’s strength is in the server market. It’s hard enough to convince people to use linux on desktops and it has to be more challenging to get people to buy linux-based pda’s.
“Linux’s strength is in the server market. It’s hard enough to convince people to use linux on desktops and it has to be more challenging to get people to buy linux-based pda’s.”
Blah, in Japan people don’t think as you. Zaurus familiy of linux PDAs sold very well and linux on PDAs is much more flexible and powerfull than use a lokk-only clone of Windows (yes, windows CE has only the windows look but it is totally different inside).
I have a Compaq iPAQ PDA which came with M$ PocketPC and the first thing I did was put linux on it. I use the familiar linux distribution and I am happy now.
“So, I guess Palm losing market share was inevitable; however what I found even more surprising is that Linux seems to be completely fizzling out in this market. It’s market share is less than half what it was a year ago, and it was already a tiny 1.9% then! I am not sure what the reason for this is, I know that Sharp recently pulled its Zaurus line from the US due to lack of demand…which is what I guess surprises me: the lack of demand. Any thoughts on that?”
I think there are several reasons for the lack of Linux devices. Probably the biggest issue is there were only a handful of devices that had Linux installed on them. And almost all of them were sold by Sharp (there were a few non-Sharp devices but I can’t think of any off of the top of my head). I have nothing against Sharp but the devices they sold were all quite expensive, and one of the big benefits of Linux is suppose to be the saving you can gain by using it. Case in point I could spend $300.00 on a very functional Palm or Pocket PC or I could spend $700.00 on a Linux PDA from Sharp.
Another reason (as with many operating system lack of popularity) is a complete lack of good software. The included software that came with the Zaurus was very poorly designed and implamented. Everything seemed to be only half finished (stability wise the programs were fairly good but feature and layout wise they were horrible in my opinion) and nothing really integrated well with every other program. Now if you need a certain program for a Palm or Pocket PC device there are a ton of places you can go to aquire them, but very few sites seem to have software that is made for a Linux powered PDA.
A third major strike against Linux powered PDAs is the lack of an decent PDA device. Now I thought Sharp (I know they are not the only player in the Linux PDA market but they are the biggest) did a lot of nice things with their PDAs (built in thumb keyboard, first actual VGA screen, clam shell form factor, the included hard drive in their next device) but it came at the expense of size and weight. My current PDA is a very small and light device, that’s almost a must for something you are carrying around in you pocket all day. But the Sharp devices have been rather large and quite heavy.
Finally I think most of the Linux equiped PDAs suffered from “too much” syndrom. Don’t get me wrong I love options and functionality but when your dealing with a small handheld device you want to avoid certain things. One of these things is a command line (well having a command line is fine by actually needing to use it for some tasks isn’t). My friend had a Zaurus and there were a few times where he actually had to use the command line to get something done, whereas I could have accomplished the same thing on a Palm or Pocket PC with the tap of a few buttons and minimal input. In actuality I think the Zaurus line was more of a micro laptop then an actual PDA (which is was marketed as).
Now if done correctly I think a Linux powered PDA would be a really nice device, but somebody would have to do some polish work before this becomes a reality.
The recent success of WinCe can be mostly attributed to the popularity of cheap (mostly brandless) Taiwanese Pocket PC/GPS devices in the European and Asian markets (based on designs from Mitac,FIC and others), it will be much more interesting to watch the upcoming battle between MS and Symbian in the cellular market.
As for Linux, the the lack of of interest is more than understood so I’m not going to write about that…
I’m a mobile developer. Today, I finished my implementation of a FTP client. I do that, because MFC doesn’t support async events for async sockets, wininet is too complicated and not compatible with some firewalls, afxinet doesn’t support GetFTpConnection() method and Windows CE doesn’t support STL.
That FTP code was created from ground up with the RFC in mind.
In the other hand, I installed Familiar Linux on my iPaq. Two minutes after that I could have a FTP client without anything else.
Ahh… Windows CE is a RTOS that support only 32 process running at the same time. Microsoft say: “use a service manager …”. Then I say, “if I do that, where are Real Time?”
Here’s a slightly more detailed article:
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3435501
Seems as is Microsoft is leading the wider embedded market as well… They’re persitant, if nothing else.
eh.. im trying to ignore the linux pda political stuff as i type this…
Palm is not managing their business well. Why did they even bother splitting the software and hardware companies off?? Also, it is much cheaper to license pocketPC than it is to license palm. Heck, PalmOne won’t even adopt the new Palm OS for fear of change….. Well look customers apparently like change as they are changing to windows.
OH, Palm, you make me sick. I liked you for awhile but I had to sell and invest in sun instead. I would still buy a Palm device though. I think a major blow was the buyout of handspring. Instead of making their own smartphones they buy out handspring. Handspring had great marketshare and palm had great marketshare. The 2 companies could have used their power seperately to compete with microsoft. No, they didn’t do that. They didn’t flood the market with multiple PalmOS devices. Oh have you looked? Palm no longer advertises that much. Let’s use logic here. When a company does not advertise that much they tend to not grow as fast. When Palm did advertise they retained their market share.
oh yeah, some people(like kim commando on the radio) are stupid when they buy PDAs thinking they can run windows desktop programs on pocket PCs….
“I think MS has shown than when it decides to go after a market, it eventually captures it, it is only a matter of how long it takes.”
MS has shown nothing of the sort; the myth of its omnipotence is vastly overstated. It dominates the personal computer operating system, office application and WWW browsing markets (though, of course, it’s hard to call the latter a market any more), and nothing else. Besides keyboards and mice (which it pays competent third parties to manufacture for it), it’s never done too well in the hardware market. Its attempts at the home entertainment market, many though they’ve been, have not yet resulted in one success (it has lost over a billion dollars on the Xbox, so far, so don’t go claiming that as a success). It’s not doing very well at cellphones so far, either. Portable media? Apple’s walking all over it. Nope, there’s nothing inevitable about a Microsoft monopoly.
The reason is hasn’t taken off are just the same as when Psion was marketing its machines, marketing failures. Costs far too much, most people do not need a PDA either.
Having said that I swapped from Psion to Zaurus and I am definitely happy with my choice. I have never had to re-install or had a crash since I bought it 1.5 years – I cannot complain at that.
Sad to see that Sharp have pulled out of the US the Zaurus. However as I said, the machines are priced way too high – just the same balls up as Psion. Great products which could lead the markets easily if priced right, but never were.
… in about two or three years
reason: network operators have a hard time differentiating themselves (other than on price)… windows mobile devices offer them multiple solutions:
– They can have their ‘own’ unique devices (for example look at offering in this area by T-Mobile (MDA II) and Orange)
– They can offer superior integration with the coporate AND consumer computing environments (Windows, Outlook, Exchange, etc.). This opens up a windows of oppertunity for the network operators where they can deliver all kinds of value added (business) services.
furthermore: on windows mobile devices one can run mono/.net apps resulting in a (current) explosion of available software for these devices. Also system integrators (implictly) promote these devices as these are the only ones they can develop software for in an environment they know. (Java really never caught on, altough it is a very capable dev environment for mobile.) I developed apps for both Palm and Windows (CE / Pocket PC) and can confirm there is an immense gap in what both environments can offer to a developer.
the best pda/mobiles run on win mobile
http://forum.xda-developers.com/index.php
http://assente.altervista.org/?q=node/view/64(ita)
Is legal to seell a pocketpc with linux?
pippo write: ”
the best pda/mobiles run on win mobile
”
hahaha very big joke
the best pda run on linux
http://www.dynamism.com/sl-c3000/index.shtml
I didn’t know it, it’s a pity that it hasn’t a gsm connection
the best harware still remains XDA3, Linux MUST conquer it!!!
http://www.dynamism.com/xda3/index.shtml