Shipments of handheld gadgets spike 14 percent

Shipments of handheld devices in Taiwan rose at a 14 percent annual pace in the second quarter as handset makers launched numerous models targeting the corporate market that have successfully spurred demand, market researcher International Data Corp (IDC) said in a report released yesterday.

Shipments of handheld devices rose to 149,776 units in the usually busy season last quarter, compared with 131,549 units a year ago and 123,973 units shipped in the first quarter, according to IDC.

Handheld devices include smart phones, personal-digital-assistant (PDA) phones and PDAs.

Smartphones and PDA phones made up a combined 87 percent of the total shipments last quarter, while PDAs without voice functions suffered a further loss in market share to 13 percent, from 24 percent in the same period last year, the IDC report indicated.

"Growth of PDA phones contributed to the market share gain," IDC analyst Sunny Chen (陳睿聆) said.

During the April to June period, shipments of PDA phones, defined by IDC as "data-centric" handheld devices that have voice functions, more than doubled to 58,854 units last quarter, compared with 27,111 units a year earlier and 29,584 units in the first quarter.

With mobile phone makers planning to unveil more PDA phones featuring popular "push-email" functions in the second half of this year after extending their reach to corporate markets, Chen expected that "corporate users will account for a growing share of the total shipment of PDA phones."

The popularity of PDA phones and smart phones will further squeeze the market share of PDAs in the second half of the year, Chen said, without making a specific forecast. Global positioning system (GPS) features have been seen as a "killer application" for PDAs, but PDAs equipped with GPS features would still not be attractive enough to offset the growing popularity of PDA phones and smart phones, Chen said.

As push-email service is rapidly winning fans in local corporations, Taiwanese telecom operators hope to gain market share by launching packages that bundle red-hot BlackBerry phones later this year. Taiwan Mobile Co (台灣大哥大) will be the first to launch the BlackBerry handset in the Taiwanese market, and will make a formal announcement tomorrow.

Without BlackBerry handsets, Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), the nation's biggest telecom carrier, said that it had made significant progress in expanding into corporate markets by offering the CHT9000 smart phone made by High Tech Computer Corp (宏達電). The phone is equipped with push-email service and enables high-speed data transmission.

The company said that many local firms, including the nation's largest food conglomerate Uni-President Enterprises Corp (統一企業), had purchased the phone for its employees.