Comments on: Palm OS US Retail Lead Gains 10 Points

MST

I wouldn't be surprised if a least small part of the reason for the pricing of the T|E2 wasn't to sell T5's, but to make the Z31 and T|E look like great deals in comparison, mostly to retail consumers, since the lower-end models probably constitutes a much greater revenue opportunity than a new high-end PDA running Garnet.

And any fashion/jewelry buyers seems to have migrated to Treo 6xx's.

Nice!

If you're referring to HP's built-in "iTask" utility, that doesn't count. It's up to Microsoft to build a fast switch feature of some form into the OS itself.

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Editor, http://Pocketfactory.com
Contributing Editor, http://digitalmediathoughts.com

All the wringing of hands over the T5/650 memory layout are reminders of why the Palm OS should NOT have a filesystem! They chew memory, and slow everything down!!

JLM.

Of course, I wouldn't object to WiFi (BT is a given, as that's what's already in there).

Oh -- but I *MUST* have 32K Memos.

F. OS6

I hear that's exactly what Tapwave said to PalmSource. With good reason. The Tapwave version of PalmOS 5 should become the standard version for regular PDAs just as Handspring's Treo OS should become the standard for smartphones. Who needs Cobalt? Cobalt, Schmobalt!

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Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.

Several site host Netfront 3.1 on the net.

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Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.

This report, as pointed out previously by another poster, is for retail sales in the US only and does NOT even mention unit sales but simply percentages of total sales.

And we have no idea how accurate it is anyway!

So the numbers could be way wrong and the market for which marketSHARE increased could have shrunk to next to nothing. that is, 70% of 100,000 units is not as nice as 50% of 200,000 units, right?

You can get lots of info on NPD at their website: http://www.npdtechworld.com/ They are the main sales-tracking service covering the US consumer electronics industry, and they track sales directly by collecting the info from the resellers. Pretty much everyone in the industry uses them to track sales.

>>Now if they're saying that the IQUE kicked >$400 PocketPC PDA's butt too... that'd be funny

That is what the report says -- that the iQue was the best-selling handheld model in that price range for the month.

Mike
CCO, PalmSource Inc.

That was probably the only instance where if Palm had not accepted returns on unsold units from retailers, those retailers would have stopped doing business with Palm.

I recall a comment from from Yankowski in mid-2001 about the possibility of Palm having to literally crush thousands of units, but instead they did some special promotions and donations and received tax write-offs, so they did not have to hire a steamroller. I wonder how much use local governments, fire departments (following 9/11), etc. ever got out of all those unwanted Palm VIIx units.

Since that time, there have been no significant periods in which PDA shipments have been seriously out of step with sales to end users.

Other than the extreme case of 2001, this type of situation has only a minor negative impact on the next quarter's shipments. In most quarters, shipments are normally within +/- 10% of net unit sales for the major vendors.