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| The Top Mobile Device Trends of 2003 Article Contents | |
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I've been looking back over the past twelve months and trying to find some meaning in all the events that happened. Some interesting trends have emerged.
I've been saying for a while that just about all handhelds will eventually have some form of wireless networking built into them. Some significant progress was made in this area in 2003. A quick look at the handhelds released over the past twelve months shows that almost every high-end model has some form of wireless networking, whether it's Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or both. Plus, every major handheld manufacturer has at least one model with built-in Wi-Fi, while some have several.
This hasn't come at the expense of making all the handhelds big and bulky, either. HP recently released the iPAQ h4155 (pictured at right), which has both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but is almost the same size as the iPAQ h1910, which came out last year with neither of these. However, there has been a price. Too many of these models have short battery lives. Wireless networking is great, but it draws a lot of power.
For all the proliferation of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-enabled models, cellular-wireless handhelds have yet to find a market. Perhaps sales of these are being impacted by smart phones, or possibly it is simply that the cellular-wireless handhelds currently available are still too big and too expensive.
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Smart phones certainly aren't a new category of devices; they've been around for years. But they rose to new prominence in 2003. Partially this was because some great new models debuted. This includes the Samsung i500 (pictured at left) and, of course, palmOne's Treo 600.
Of course, a lot of the hoopla surrounded the introduction of smart phones running a Microsoft operating system. In October, AT&T Wireless and Motorola released the MPx200, the first Windows powered smart phone for the North American market. It was followed shortly thereafter by Samsung's i600.
While most pundits are predicting that smart phones will soon outsell handhelds, there are still a few flies in the ointment. A survey was recently conducted of smart phone users, most of whom complained their devices are difficult to use and that tech support for them is unsatisfactory.
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Features that used to be available on only very expensive models inevitably work their way down to the mid-range and even low-cost ones. This happens with all kinds of products, from cars to TVs to handhelds.
Quite a few models were released this year in the $200 to $250 price range that offered an array of features that once were solely for high-end handhelds. Devices like the iPAQ h1935, Clie TJ35, and the Tungsten E (pictured at right) have color screens, fast processors, and strong multimedia capabilities, despite their reasonable prices. Dell even introduced the Axim X3i, the first handheld with built-in Wi-Fi to debut for less than $400.
At the same time, features that used to be common on mid-range devices are being relegated to entry-level models, or even disappearing altogether. The only company still making a handheld with a monochrome screen is palmOne. And no one is using the old Motorola Dragonball processors any more. Even the entry-level Zire 21 has an ARM-based CPU.
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Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC wasn't the huge improvement many were hoping for, but it did apparently kick HP into high gear. In the six months since Windows Mobile 2003 debuted, HP has released no less than seven new iPAQ models. It even put out more handhelds than Sony during that time period.
The quality certainly hasn't suffered. These have been some of the best iPAQs ever. For example, the h2215 (pictured at right) broke new ground for being compact while still offering dual memory card slots and Bluetooth, while the h4355 was the first iPAQ to include a built-in keyboard.
While HP has put out some appealing models, it is still being very conservative in its designs. It was Toshiba, not HP, who released the first Pocket PC with a VGA screen, for instance. The most radical thing HP did was release a model with a keyboard, which several companies have done already.
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For too long, Palm was kind of drifting along. It took an entire year to come out with the m515, a slightly improved version of the m505. It was only near the end of 2002 that it put out the Tungsten T, which finally put the company back near the cutting edge.
This year, Palm (and now palmOne) has been much more aggressive and released a number of well-received handhelds. This includes steadily improving the Tungsten T series until it has reached the Tungsten T3 (pictured at left), a model that gave people what they had been begging for, a hi-res+ screen in a tablet design. This device has garnered praise from even some hardcore Pocket PC fans.
But all of palmOne's success hasn't been at the high end. Its Zire 71 was very well received and so was its Tungsten E. Though most hard core handheld users wouldn't dream of using one, the original Zire, with its monochrome screen and minimal memory, was the best-selling handheld of 2003.
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For several years, Sony put out models that kept the company solidly on the cutting edge. In 2002, Sony broke new ground with the Clie NR70V, which had a clamshell design and a 320-by-480 pixel screen. This year, its competitors caught up and even surpassed Sony in some of the areas that it used to dominate. The palmOne Tungsten T3 has the same screen resolution as the best Sony model, plus it offers both portrait and landscape support, which no Sony model does. And the Toshiba e805 has a VGA screen, which means it has twice the pixels of any Clie.
Sony did come out with some innovative handhelds this year. Its Clie UX50 (pictured at left) offers everything but the kitchen sink, but its small screen and high price kept this model from widespread appeal.
Sony has carved out a niche for itself by offering handhelds with strong multimedia capabilities. However, several Palm models now offer good multimedia support and Pocket PCs have always had both audio and video capabilities. Therefore, Sony seems to be shifting its focus a bit. The UX series is targeted not at multimedia junkies but businesspeople, and so are Sony's new TJ models. The Clie TJ25 doesn't even have a headphone jack, making it essentially useless as an audio player.
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