Brighthand's Predictions for 2003; How Did We Do?

At the end of 2002, Steve Bush and I collaborated on making some predictions for 2003. Let's take a look at how we did.

I predicted that smart phone sales would increase when compared with the previous year.

I don't have exact figures for smart phone sales for 2003 yet but there's no doubt they increased markedly during the year.

Steve predicted that handheld sales would remain about the same as they were in 2002.

Again, we don't have results from the whole year yet, but sales were down during the first two quarters of the year, while they went up slightly in the third quarter. Sales for the entire year will probably end up being down slightly for all of 2003, but that's just my estimation.

Steve said that Handspring would be acquired during 2003 and I went out on a limb and said it would be acquired by Palm.

On this one we were absolutely right. Handspring was acquired by Palm in late October.

I said that Dell wouldn't be as significant a part of the handheld market as some people thought it would be. At the time, there were predictions that Dell would quickly rise to be one of the top handheld manufacturers, maybe even the top one, on the strength of its low-cost Axim X5 series.

Though its Axim Line has given Dell 6% or 7% of the worldwide market, that's only enough to be in fourth place, well behind companies like palmOne and HP.

In the wireless area, I predicted that we'd see our first handheld that has built-in GPRS, or CDMA, and Wi-Fi.

This didn't happen. Though both HP and Dell have said they are working on models that offer Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and some form of cellular-wireless capabilities, these aren't expected until later in 2004.

I also said Palm OS 6 would come out and would have a very similar user interface as Palm OS 5.

Though technically PalmSource may have already given OS 6 to its licensees, no devices have come out using it and there have only been a few leaked glimpses of what the user interface might be.

Steve predicted that an upcoming version of Pocket PC would be based on Windows XP, not Windows CE.

Steve didn't say this would definitely happen in 2003, but there certainly haven't been any signs so far.

Final Score

Looks like we got four right but three wrong. Not bad when it comes to the difficult job of predicting the future.

We're carrying on the tradition and I've made some predictions for 2004. You can be sure I'll be back in 2005 to see how I did on them.