Smartphones will kill off PDAs - IDC
By the end of this year, the plain, vanilla PDA market will have shrunk by nearly ten per cent. Instead, users are demanding "converged" devices, says a survey by research company IDC. And at last, the market seems to be getting the design right.
The shrinking of the PDA business isn't a new trend, either. It will come as small surprise to anybody working with mobile devices, but the figures show that PDAs without voice capabilities sold less this year than last year by 8.4 per cent - the second year in a row that sales have dropped substantially.
IDC's analysis: "From mobile phones to converged mobile devices, which combine the data capabilities of PDAs with the voice communication capabilities of mobile phones, competing device types will draw buyers away from traditional handheld devices."
