| Windows CE zooms past Palm |
Nov. 12, 2004
In the third quarter of 2004, for the first time, more PDAs shipped with Microsoft's Windows CE and Pocket PC OSes than with Palm OS, according to Gartner. Windows CE based OSes captured 48.1 percent of the more than 2.8 million PDAs shipped, with Palm accounting for just 29.8 percent, down from 46.9 percent in the same period last year, Gartner says.
"The robust Microsoft Windows CE market has been driven in part by the wide choice of vendors," noted Todd Kort, a principal analyst in Gartner's Computing Platforms Worldwide group. "Business customers tend to steer clear of markets dominated by a single supplier, which is where the Palm OS market stands today."
Preliminary Worldwide PDA Shipment Estimates by Operating System for Q3-04 (units)
| Operating system | 3Q04 Shipments | 3Q04 Market Share (%) | 3Q03 Shipments | 3Q03 Market Share (%) | Growth (%) |
| Windows CE | 1,375,866 | 48.1 | 1,037,874 | 41.2 | 32.6 | | Palm OS | 850,821 | 29.8 | 1,181,202 | 46.9 | -28.0 | | Research In Motion | 565,000 | 19.8 | 123,775 | 4.9 | 356.5 | | Linux | 24,500 | 0.9 | 48,550 | 1.9 | -49.5 | | Others | 42,620 | 1.5 | 125,745 | 5.0 | -66.1 | | Total | 2,858,807 | 100.0 | 2,517,146 | 100.0 | 13.6 |
Note: Totals do not include smartphones such as the Treo 600 or BlackBerry 7100 but include wireless PDAs such as the iPAQ 6315.
Source: Gartner Dataquest (November 2004)
Earlier this year, Gartner found that Microsoft and Palm were in a virtual tie at about 40 percent each for the first quarter. "A decline in Palm OS shipments was expected in the third quarter of 2004, but not of this magnitude," Kort said.
This news of Windows CE surpassing Palm OS follows on the heels of a recent report from ABI Research suggesting that Microsoft's Windows Mobile Smartphone OS may be on track to surpass Symbian in the mobile phone market by 2009. In a similar vein, VDC recently ranked Microsoft as the overall top vendor of embedded OSes in 2003. All of this positive growth no doubt contributed to the 30 percent revenue increase for Microsoft's Embedded and Mobile Devices segment during the company's first fiscal quarter.
Interestingly, Gartner expects worldwide PDA shipments to total 11.9 million units in 2004, up approximately 4 percent from 2003. This view differs from a recent report from IDC that projected continued decline in handheld device shipments.
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