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Pastimes : Computer Learning -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rick Faurot who wrote (30613)	11/20/2002 3:55:07 PM
From: Lost1	Respond to of 110652

Dell hands Pocket PC makers a challenge By Bob Keefe WEST COAST BUREAU Tuesday, November 19, 2002 LAS VEGAS -- With its entry Monday into the business of hand-held computers, Dell Computer Corp. is expected to do exactly what it did for desktops -- drive down prices and make computing even more ubiquitous. Dell unveiled its first two entries into the market for hand-helds, which are becoming increasingly popular among corporate users, at the annual Comdex technology conference here. Priced between $199 and $299 after rebates, both offer more computing power at significantly lower prices than most comparable models. Another Austin-based company also made news Monday. Motion Computing Inc.'s tablet PCs will be sold by consumer computer maker Gateway Inc. Motion is one of several companies -- including Hewlett-Packard Co., Toshiba Corp. and Acer Inc. -- that are selling the new machines, which allow users to write information by hand as well as type it on a keyboard. Dell's entry into hand-helds already has one competitor scrambling. At least partly in reaction to Dell's move, H-P on Monday introduced a version of its i- PAQ hand-held that matches Dell's $299 device in price and in memory -- 64 megabytes -- but uses a slower processor, 200 megahertz versus Dell's 400 megahertz. H-P, which leads the market in hand-helds based on Microsoft Corp.'s Pocket PC software, had previously priced its most comparable iPAQ at about $500. Toshiba, second in the Pocket PC business, currently sells its cheapest model for about $399. "I think what Dell is doing is resetting people's expectations about what prices on (hand-helds) should be," said Todd Kort, an analyst with technology research company Gartner Inc. Kort predicts that by the end of next year, Dell's Axim X5 models could capture 25 percent of the market for Pocket PC-based hand-helds. Currently, H-P has about half the Pocket PC market, and Toshiba has about 20 percent, with other makers splitting the rest, according to Kort. In all, devices based on Microsoft's Pocket PC software account for about 40 percent of the entire market for hand-helds, according to Dell officials. Lower-priced devices using the Palm Inc. operating software dominate the rest of the market. With relatively low prices, Dell could become a formidable challenger not only to the Pocket PC-based devices but also the lower-price Palm devices. "It will definitely have a major impact on the entire market," Kort said. The entry into hand-helds was vintage Dell: It waited until other companies established a market, then moved in with lower prices in hopes of grabbing market share quickly "It was really just a matter of time before hand-helds . . . fit into Dell's business model," said Anthony Bonadero, Dell's director of marketing for mobile products. "Our operating costs are roughly half of some of our competitors'. That's basically what you see in the prices we announced" Monday. Dell's move into the market for hand-helds also is expected to make the devices more common. In a speech opening Comdex on Sunday night, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates pointed to Dell's entry in the business as a signal that hand-helds could be on the way to becoming as ordinary as PCs are today. Nonetheless, Dell's timing isn't exactly perfect. In the third quarter, sales of hand-helds declined about 6 percent from a year ago, according to figures from technology-research company IDC, which predicts the market will continue to soften through the end of the year because of the overall poor economy. "The hand-held market is not growing like we'd like to see it grow right now," Dell's Bonadero said. "But we think up until now, that has a lot to do with the lack of innovation and pricing." bkeefe@coxnews.com