Worldwide Handheld Shipments Break Records Again

Interest in wireless email drove the worldwide handheld market to a record number of shipments last year, according to market research firm Gartner, Inc.

The total number of devices shipped was 17.7 million units, an 18.4 percent increase from 2005.

"60 percent of all PDAs shipped in 2006 offered cellular connectivity, up from 47 percent in 2005," said Todd Kort, principal analyst in Gartner's Computing Platforms Worldwide group.

Based on the last quarter's results, Gartner now expects handheld shipments to exceed 20 million units in 2007, with about 70 percent of these being cellular-wireless devices.

Results by Company

Research In Motion (RIM) continued to lead the handheld market, but its product mix has been rapidly shifting toward smartphones and away from handhelds.

The company shipped more than 1.8 million BlackBerry devices in the final quarter of last year, with an estimated 915,000 of these considered by Gartner to be PDAs and the rest being smartphones.

For all of 2006, RIM shipped roughly 3.5 million handhelds.

Palm's handheld shipments declined 29 percent in 2006 as this company, like RIM, continued to focus on the smartphone market with its Treo line and paid less and less attention to traditional handhelds.

It shipped 670 thousand Treos and nearly 575 thousand handhelds during the fourth quarter of last year, and 1.9 million traditional handhelds during all of 2006.

HP shipped 540 thousand handhelds in the last three months of 2006, accounting for 9.5 percent of all PDAs shipped but fewer than 16 percent of all Windows Mobile devices.

This company's numbers were bumped up by models like the iPAQ hw6900 series, which Gartner considers to be cellular-wireless handhelds, not smartphones. These devices comprised about one-third of HP’s total shipments.

More information can be found on Gartner's web site.

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