A recent report by IDC is confirmed by Canalys: mobile devices had indeed a great year in Europe as over 1 million handhelds and 2 million smartphones shipped in the last quarter.
The year ended on a high for most mobile device vendors in EMEA according to the latest research from analyst firm Canalys. Not only did the likes of Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Orange manage to ship over 2 million smartphones between them, but the handheld market, at times dismissed by some as being almost saturated, managed to post a record quarter, with well over 1 million devices shipped.
Highlights include HP becoming the clear leader in handheld segment, with 33% share of shipments in Q4 2003; Palm chalking up a second place with a 25% share as shipments fall 19% compared to year-ago quarter; the last quarter of 2003 becoming the first in EMEA where handhelds broke the 1 million unit barrier; and Nokia - unsurprisingly - retained smartphone leadership with 78%.
"Handhelds have found a new lease of life with the arrival of competitively priced GPS navigation bundles," said Canalys senior analyst and director Chris Jones. "In some countries, Germany being a prime example, major retailers are now insisting on navigation solutions in preference to standalone handhelds, and the leading vendors are taking advantage of this. Vendors without navigation bundles will find it harder to get shelf space - Palm and Sony are pointed out by Canalys as having some catching up to do in this area.
Also, Canalys predicts it will become more and more difficult to sell such devices purely on the basis of personal information management. Low end handhelds are competing with smartphones offering a similar level of functionality; high end models must offer other benefits to justify their higher price points."
Jones points out that navigation benefits from the larger screens of handhelds, though he expects that smartphone vendors will eventually wake up to the opportunity. Providing audio feedback can offset the disadvantage of a smaller screen, and as regulation forces drivers to mount mobile phones on their dashboards smartphone vendors will turn this to their advantage.
Handheld vendors, and HP in particular, have also benefited from a rise in corporate IT expenditure. Some of the pilot projects that were put on hold in leaner times are now beginning to develop into larger deployments.
"As enterprise spending on mobile device solutions grows, smartphone vendors will also want a piece of the action," said analyst Rachel Lashford. "Nokia continues to add to its range, and enjoyed a large initial ship out of the Nokia 6600 this quarter - its most 'corporate'
smartphone handset to date. We expect Nokia to target the corporate mobility solutions segment very hard this year, and the Symbian OS is now reaching the shipment levels needed to make it a contender in the enterprise."
In terms of product segmentation, Nokia's smartphone range is unrivalled, but other vendors have also boosted their offerings. Sony Ericsson's evolutionary P900 is performing better than its predecessor, Siemens finally got its SX1 to market, albeit in a limited release, and late-comer Motorola capitalised, via the A920, on NEC's inability to deliver sufficient quantities of 3G phones, as well as boosting Microsoft's fortunes in the voice-centric segment with a reasonable first quarter of shipments of the MPx200.
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