Gartner has released a report supporting what has become clear over the course of the last year or two, that PDA vendors are beginning to feel the impact of smartphones and enhanced mobile phones.

According to the research firm, worldwide PDA shipments totaled 11.5 million units in 2003, a 5.3% decline from 2002. Gartner points out that Mobile phones and smartphones will continue to have a negative impact on the PDA markets this year too.

"Through the end of 2004, smartphones will generally have a negative impact on the low end of the PDA market, as many individual users will find the personal information management (PIM) and e-mail capabilities of smartphones acceptable," said Todd Kort, principal analyst in Gartner's Computing Platforms Worldwide group. "These users will tend to become less interested in low-end PDAs that have provided these capabilities."

The company also predicts that the immediate impact will be largely felt by Palm OS vendors as more of these users, as opposed to Windows Mobile for Pocket PC users, use their device chiefly for personal information management. By 2005, as smartphones make there way deeper into the enterprise, Microsoft’s share of the PDA market will also suffer.

Research in Motion (RIM) thrived in the fourth quarter of 2003 with nearly the same total of devices shipped in that one quarter as all of 2002. RIM posted the strongest growth rate among top-tier vendors in 2003, as shipments increased 121 percent from 2002 . Approximately 35 to 40 percent of recent RIM shipments were upgrades of older RIM devices. RIM's subscriber base is now close to one million users worldwide.