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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kirk © who wrote (44792)	3/30/2001 10:27:29 AM
From: Proud_Infidel	Respond to of 70976

PDA Sales Heat Up on Price Cuts and Aggressive Promotion March 30, 2001 (TAIPEI) -- Despite the faltering InfoTech market, sales of personal digital assistants and Pocket PCs remain robust, thanks to the sharp drop in the price of and various promotion campaigns tailored for the gadgets. Since the beginning of March, PDA powerhouses Palm Inc. and Handspring Inc. have been trimming the price of their PDAs. Meanwhile, IBM Corp. and Compaq Computer Corp. have also been working to boost the sales of their Pocket PCs by launching preferential packages for the product. WebLink International Inc., local agent for Palm PDAs, announced earlier this month a cut in the price of the Palm Vx and Palm IIIc. While the price of the hot-selling Palm Vx has dropped from NT$13,800 (about US$422 at NT$32.66 = US$1) to NT$13,660, that of the color-monitor Palm IIIc even shrunk to NT$9,800. Recently, Palm has rolled out Palm M105, an upgraded version of the Palm M100 featuring 8MB of storage capacity and changeable cases. In order to survive in the sharpened competitive environment for both low- and high-range Palm PDAs, makers of other brands have been prompted to promote their sales by cutting prices and complementing their merchandise with wireless communications packages. As a result, the PDA market has been thriving on these aggressive marketing tactics for the last two months. Meanwhile, the Windows CE-based Pocket PC market has been heating up, too, suggesting that audio-video functions and connectivity with PCs are playing a pivotal role in the consumer market here. Thanks to that vogue, the penetration of Pocket PCs made by Compaq and Hewlett-Packard Co. has been rising in the Taiwanese market. Market Intelligence Center estimates that the WinCE stands to grab 25 percent of the local handheld operating system market, intensifying the competition against its archrival Palm. For the moment, local Pocket PC users are looking forward to the higher availability of the Chinese version of WinCE 3.0, an improved breed which has solved a number of problems associated with the previous system, particularly the time-consuming booting process and heavy power consumption. Currently, LEO Systems Inc. is the sole local vendor of Pocket PCs running on the Chinese WinCE 3.0, but this situation will only last until April this year, when foreign counterparts like Compaq launch their Chinese WinCE 3.0 Pocket PCs. Related story: Palm Seeks PDA Contract Manufacturers in Taiwan (Commercial Times, Taiwan)