According to Gartner, in the second quarter of 2005, worldwide PDA shipments increased by 32 percent. According to IDC, shipments decreased by almost 21 percent in the second quarter, marking the sixth quarter in a row of decline for the sector.

The divergent stats on what apparently is the same sector is nothing new and has in fact been going for some time. The catch? They both have different definitions of what constitutes the PDA or handheld market. IDC doesn't include devices that have cellular capability in its definition, which is something that Gartner does. In Gartner's definition of the market, "A PDA may offer WAN support for voice, but these are data-first, voice-second devices."

In February of this year, Gartner analyst Todd Kort told internetnews.com that Gartner takes a different view of how to define a PDA and a smartphone. "There are some devices IDC classifies as smartphones that we think of as PDAs."

From Gartner's point of view there were 3.6 million PDA units shipped worldwide in 2Q05 (a 32 percent year-over-year increase). Based on the second quarter performance, Gartner has forecast the market will break its 2001 record of 13.2 million units and hit 15 million units shipped in 2005.

The leading PDA vendor, according to Gartner was, Research in Motion (RIM) with a 23 percent market share and 840,000 units shipped in the quarter. RIM's second quarter performance was an almost 65 percent improvement over its results from the same period a year ago. Number-two vendor Palm, at almost 18 percent market share, reported an almost 30 percent decline from last year to 642,000 units shipped.

HP's PDA offering didn't fair all that well either, recording a 15 percent decline, which was still enough for a 12.5 percent market share on volume of 450,513 units shipped.

The leading OS on PDAs, according to Gartner, is Microsoft , with a 46 percent market share, which was fuelled by 64 percent growth in the quarter vs. the same period last year. As an operating system, RIM shipped 65 percent more units than it did last year, which was enough to give it a 23 percent share. Palm declined by 41 percent, giving it a 19 percent market share, which itself is down dramatically from the 42 percent share it held of all PDA operating systems a year ago.

IDC's Handheld market report (which does not include RIM) had Palm as the top vendor, with a market share of 36.5 percent. Palm's shipped volume was down by 31 percent for the second quarter. HP held onto the number-two spot at 18 percent market but also reported a 39 percent decline in shipped unit volume.

A Third Way
There's another method of looking at the PDA/smartphone market employed by research firm Canalys. While it chooses to define PDAs as handhelds without cellular capabilities, like IDC, it does so within a larger context than either of the other two analysts.

Canalys examines the PDA and smartphone market in total, under a single category it labels smart devices.

So, for example, by its measure the smart mobile device market grew by 82 percent during the first quarter of 2005 compared to the same period a year earlier. PDA shipments dropped by 6 percent, while smartphone deliveries grew by an astounding 137 percent, however.

According to Canalys, the Symbian platform continued to dominate with 61.4 percent of the market. By comparison, Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform dropped to 18.3 percent from 23.1 percent of the market. The Palm OS fell even further, moving from 22 percent to 10.5 percent of the smart device market.

Even though Research In Motion—platform and device go hand in hand—landed in fourth place on Canalys's list at 7 percent, the number of BlackBerry handhelds sold actually doubled.

Manufacturers
Nokia continued to carry the success of the Symbian OS on its shoulders with 82 percent of all devices built on that platform. The mobile phone giant correspondently accounted for 50 percent of all smart device shipments during the first quarter of 2005.

PalmOne, a distant second behind Nokia, tallied 9.4 percent of worldwide smart device shipments; followed by RIM with its aforementioned 7 percent, Fujitsu with 6.1 percent, and Hewlett-Packard with 5.6 percent.