While the world's mobile professionals continue to buy fewer PDAs than they have in the past, the low-end of the market continues to show some strength, market watcher IDC said yesterday.

Worldwide PDA shipments fell 16.7 per cent between Q3 2005 and Q3 2004, IDC's numbers show, with the most recently completed calendar quarter's shipments totalling just under 1.7m units. Shipments were down 8.5 per cent on Q2 2005's total, IDC said.

The market's number two, HP, managed a sequential increase in shipments of 4.4 per cent, but was down 35.4 per cent year on year. It took 23.6 per cent of the market, IDC said.

Fourth-placed Dell was down too, by 13.9 per cent year on year and 9.6 per cent sequentially. Like Palm and HP, it has primarily targeted traditional executive PDA buyers.

However, Acer, in third place, and Mio, in fifth, both saw year-on-year gains, up 421 per cent and 58 per cent, respectively. Both have built a solid user base at the low end of the market, in the main by targeting consumers seeking low-cost GPS satellite navigation bundles. They have also benefited from other players' departures from the market.

Like HP, Acer saw a small, 5.3 per cent sequential gain, but Mio's shipments were down 22.6 per cent on the previous quarter.

Acer, Dell and Mio took 11.2 per cent, 9.6 per cent and 5.1 per cent, respectively, of the market in Q3. Other vendors together accounted for 16.8 per cent of the market.

Looking to the current quarter, IDC said it expects shipments to rise above Q3 levels for most vendors but still be below last year's numbers. ®

Related stories

• Sales of handheld devices continue to drop (28 April 2006)
• Mobile phone shipments to hit 1bn in 2006 (21 April 2006)
• Palm pledges three new smart phones in 2006 (21 December 2005)
• Palm sales surpass expectations (21 December 2005)
• Mio unveils GPS-equipped PocketPC (13 December 2005)
• Mio GPS smart phone to ship mid-December (30 November 2005)
• Asus GPS PDAs hit UK streets this month (11 November 2005)
• Palm chief denies Palm OS pull-back (9 November 2005)
• Palm kicks off Euro 3G smart-phone R&D drive (28 October 2005)
• Nokia, Moto drive world smart-phone sales (26 October 2005)
• Nokia BlackBerry killers hit the streets (12 October 2005)
• Review Nokia 9300: our long term test (1 October 2005)
• Review i-mate Jasjar PocketPC phone (30 September 2005)
• Palm makes Q1 sales gains (23 September 2005)