Palm retail sales revived in May

Palm experienced something of a rebound in retail sales in May, according to the latest figures from US market watcher NPD Intelect.

Palm's US retail marketshare hit 69.4 per cent, up from 62.1 per cent in April and the highest share Palm has taken since September 2000.

Driving Palm's revival was its colour iPaq-esque m505 PDA. The black-and-white m500 did relatively badly, despite its greater availability. Clearly consumers want colour, and the Palm OS-based PDA producers have to respond to that demand. Sony already is, with its latest device. While it didn't figure highly in May, NPD said, preliminary data for June suggests a surge in Sony sales. Whether they will expand the Palm OS marketshare or eat into Palm and Handspring's shares remains to be seen.

Speaking of Handspring, the Palm OS licensee saw its May marketshare fall to 15.3 per cent from 19.2 per cent the previous month. However, the dip didn't dent Palm's gain, which was sufficient to increase the Palm OS' share of the market to 84.7 per cent from 81.3 per cent in April.

That said, Handspring's drop leaves it on a par with the combined share of the main PocketPC players, Hewlett-Packard, Casio and Compaq. HP rose from 5.4 per cent in April to 6.1 per cent in May. Casio took 4.1 per cent of the market in May (down from 5.6 per cent), Compaq just 2.9 per cent (from 3.6 per cent).

We note that Compaq is now attempting to make a virtue of its inability to supply sufficient numbers of its iPaq PDA earlier this year. The company's new ad slogan reads: "We've removed an important feature: the waiting list." It's poor showing in the retail chart might suggest otherwise, but with iPaq sales driven by corporate purchasers, NPD Intelect's numbers don't give a full picture of how any of the players are performing in toto.

PDA sales through the retail were in May were up 78 per cent year on year by units and 55 per cent by value, a sign of how far prices have fallen during the 12-month period. ®