Comments on: Palm SG Enters China's Handheld Market

You got a point. It will be interesting to see how PSG does there.

Which ones? My m105 has "made in Mexico" printed on it´s back...don´t know about other models

My Tungsten got a "Made in China" tatoo, so does my colleague's Zire.

My M505 says it was assembled in USA

Cheers

Well isn't it all a bit dangerous, what with the SARS outbreak and everything...

I don´t understand this...

"According to IDC, China is the largest handheld-device market in the Asia Pacific region (excluding Japan) and accounts for 68 percent of total shipments in the region in calendar 2002"

and then

"China is the world's second largest handheld market, and accounted for about 20% of the world's handheld units last year."

so, which is the biggest handheld market in the world, Japan? If you include Japan in the Asian Pacific region numbers, then China is in second place, and since China is second worldwide ergo...

Am I ok? Where´s the US?

Don't be silly. America is still the #1 market for handhelds. And cheap Chinese imports made for fractions of a cent that are sold in 99-cent stores here and tend to fall apart with a week (I once bought a brush to sweep my floor -- I put it under hot water to clean it and the *bristles melted*!).

I might be wrong on this, but didn't Japanese cars came into the North America market as the "cheap little ones" ?? Now Korean cars are been marketed as "great deal" for the money.

Now, I'm not saying Chinese made goods will follow the path of that of Japanese and Korean goods. But history tends to repeate itself. Maybe, just mayby, in the decades to come, China might be makeing most of the stuff that we use anyway and the quility of these goods will be accpeted by most people.

Unicode or not, it's great to hear that there's finally a "CJKOS Chinese software system and PenPower handwriting software built into the handheld." Is this an officially localized version of Palm OS in CJK? If so, where can I get pick one up? Or alternatively, I wonder if they will ever make it available to us. Then we can update our Tungsten|T ROM with this OS, for a price, naturally. That would be awesome. (And in case some of you may have missed it or are confused, the American T|T advertises as only having 4MB of ROM, but it's actually 8MB like the ones they sell outside the USA. You can check ROM size in applications such as FileZ to verify this claim).

I've been going through the forums and have never been able to get any information on this subject (other than 3rd party apps which sit on top of English POS, but they're usually unstable). I've been waiting so long for a PDA with a Palm OS system that supports Korean language natively. Any information would be greatly appreciated. :)

Jim

: Is this an officially localized version of Palm OS in CJK?

Hahahah.. nevermind about this question. I meant to delete it, but I guess I was faster at hitting the submit button than I am at proofreading. 10 lashes for me! ;)

Anyway, I just hope it truly does support Japanese and Korean to the fullest. Then it would be a great opportunity for Palm to finally grab some marketshare in S. Korea.

Jim

Months ago I came across an article on the web about China's PDA producers. It's a bloody cutthroat business over there! (Sorry, lost the URL!) Most of China remains in a Third World state, which is primarily the country, but the urban areas are fast becoming strictly First World (at least on the surface; a woman who recently went to a new hotel in China reported back to me that there was NO hot water!).

Here's some stuff to look at just from my popping "Chinese PDAs" and "Chinese PDA" into Google:

http://tinyurl.com/aa32

http://tinyurl.com/aa33

http://tinyurl.com/aa3c

Palm SG already have office in Hong Kong for a long long time. This article refers to mainland China.

Alan
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Read your manuals before you ask!!

HK is a separate entity all in all from china.. and most of china are still relatively backward, lots of uneven development throughout china.. most of the stuff we see or hear on the media are juz showcasing the best of china and do not represent the whole of china.. in short, only the good things reach our ears

do you think the phone line can transport viruses too?

Hey, Wake up very body....

China is the fastest growing country in the world. Still some third world places but most of the Eastern cost region are quite developped. And China Electronic are moving very fast.

Ex. Last year all the chinese phones were crap and there are now quite OK. It's going very, very fast here. And when we need 1 year to developp one generation of PDA in Europe and US, they running 2 or 3 generations (even if is still behind for the time being).

Soon everybody will know Haier, Legend, TCL. Every month, there is 5 millions of new mobile users !!! During this time, our old western countries are just sleeping.

Look here to get a hint for overall figures :
http://www.digitimes.com/Backgrounders/Telecom/T0001.asp

And for Amoisonic : http://www.amoisonic.com/
And for Haier : http://appserver.legend.com/Product/Product_PDA/Product_detail.asp?productid=1833
And for TCL : http://www.tcl.com/china/products/index.jsp
And for Bird : http://www.chinabird.com/

DP, an European lost in China

phone lines cant transport biological viruses for goodness sake..

the points made above arent valid at all..

SMS has already long been popular in China and HK for the last few years.. and Palm probably already carved a niche for itself in HK years ago when HK was still under the brits with an open market, and HK still is an open market except for some restrictions set down by mainland China...

and there is an influx of cheap phones with SMS capabilities for the past few years in china and where Pocket Pc is dominant..

ingen, I agree. SMS is nothing new to anyone outside of the USA. Europe and Asia have already been SMS-ing for a long time now (though, not sure about S. America), and cell phones are the reasons for this, not PDA's.

: and there is an influx of cheap phones with SMS
: capabilities for the past few years in china and
: where Pocket Pc is dominant..

This is true, not only there, but in S. Korea as well. But, getting back on the PDA side of the topic, in S. Korea, while some companies that produce their own PDA and OS's have the majority of the PDA market, Pocket PC is more prevalent than Palm. Palm has almost zero marketshare there.

Then again, a friend of mine who visits S. Korea often would tell me that the reason PDA's aren't that big a deal is because almost EVERYONE has a cellphone and they use that as their "PDA" mainly for phonebook and calendar events. Those that need more are a small percentage. If anyone living in Korea could verify this, that would be great.

Jim

its agreeable that most parts of China are developing, but its at an uneven pace.. much of the development by china's homegrown players shd attribute success to the sheer numbers of untapped markets and that of foreign companies' incompetence of catching the hearts of the locals

plus, although china's enconomy is growing, that is not so for the rest of the world.. Legend and its likes may be well known names in China having built up a reputation as a chinese company, but they may not have much opportunties overseas where the markets are over-saturated.. and it would still be well to note that the main-concentration of their income is still from the chinese markets

Sigh** You counted?

Zippy, just how long is it since you've been in China? I think you'll find things have changed a tad since your last visit, which was around the time of the Long March I would guess.

(seriously, I got a chuckle out of your post. Thanks!)

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- Steve Smith
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

Hahaha! Chickens and Long March. Two hilarious posts! Thanks for the chuckles. Let's just hope Palm doesn't release something that can be acronymed "SARS."