Dell Computer is planning to unveil two handhelds–one priced at $199–based on Microsoft’s Pocket PC 2002 OS this fall, according to sources. This possibly will be the cheapest PocketPC to date, which can create lots of market and sell problems to Palm’s new products. In the meantime, Sharp is preparing the new Zaurus. A great place to stay in touch with mobile computing, would be InfoSync.
Dell to Pitch $199 Handheld at Comdex
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Palm has them beat….
thanks for killing the margins in yet another industry dell.
Seriously though, can dell possibly make money off of this? 199 is low for a pocket PC with those specs.
I guess it could create problems for zire but the latter is still a good bit cheaper and more stylish, even without the color screen. The dell unit could be used to define boring and it shows, once again, that dell is incapable of differentiating their offering via anything but price.
Threat to zire? What about the threat to HPaq and the other pocket PC makers. Dell is ruining the entire pocket pc business model. Other people want margins not dell.
The pocket pc clan are failing where the palm OEMs are succeeding. The latter are offering some personlization. Just about every pocket PC device that i have seen is identical. I can’t tell the difference. Bad model.
Umm. No. 2 megs of memeroy and a smaller screen (why did they shrink them? The palm III screens were better). I dont mean to be rude to Palm, but they need get their act together. Their products are getting worse instead of better.
Look at the m100 (105, whatever) for example. I’ve picked it up sevral times in stores to try it out and it’s so flimsy it could be snapped with one hand! (well, okay, mabye not one. but its very flimsy) And what’s with the screen. It’s small. Why.
The Zire looks sturdy and has a nice sleek case design (the m100series case jsut looks ugly IMOP) but judging by the pictures on the website they shrunk the screen size even more! Are they insane?
And 2 megs of memory? My old palmV has that, and a bigger screen. They should have just kept making that one. Really, I used to love Palm products but they are going downhill (the new wireless one is nice tho)
I would rather spend an extra $50USD and get the Sony Clie if I was going to buy a entry level palm.
The Dell one looks real nice. at $200 and $300 USD it could be a real compiteter. If the $200 one has a color screen (i know the pictures of the $300 dollar one does, but i dont remember hearing about the screen for the two hundred dolalr one) then it’s going to be some serious competition for Palm. Hmm, mabye OSNews should do a PDA roundup type of thing.
That’s a $99 Palm Pilot with a 16 MHz CPU running PalmOS 4.1 vs. a $199 PockectPC 2002 with a 300 MHz XScale CPU.
I really don’t think a CPU speed war is an issue on a PDA though. I don’t think that is a big deal for that market like on the desktop. Performance isn’t the issue, price and features are the main issue in that market, I’d think.
Anyone who is serious about shopping around for a PDA will take one look at the Zire and keep on walking. It’s like Apple offering the 68K-based Quadra’s at half price when the 601-based Powermac has just been announced and they are taking orders. Throw into the mix that the PC crowd has suddenly got a machine midway priced between the two and it rounds out the analogy.
The Zire is insane. Targeting the lower-end market? They are about 12 months too late or 6 months too soon on that one, depending on how you look at it. Right now would be a TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE time to buy new non-Arm/XScale PDA.
There seem to be a lot of people that see little use for a PDA. I have spoken to a number of PDA users that see little need to upgrade their PDAs as well. Gadget freaks might love the sonys and compaqs (i do) but the low price of the zire might succeed in extending the audience of the product. The dell is still too expensive to do that. Still, i think under $100 would catch more eyes for the zire, say $89.
The zaurus points the way to laptop replacement which is where palm needs to go was well in the future.
I will _never_ buy a portable computer w/o a keyboard unless it has complete voice control. The display technology of today is still so low that writing on palmtop screens is a joke. Until I can write _exactly_ the same size as I do in real life, a pen computer is nothing more than a dayplanner you can play games on.
Now, a computer like the new Zaurus is something I could definitely get used to. The screen is big enough to be useful and it has enough power (esp. w/a real OS) to run circles around its crippled competitors, CE, and Palm. PalmOS was written to run on the same processors as the ancient Sinclair Spectrums, Windows CE has been stripped of everything useful, including binary compatibility.
I believe if this device were a might bit smaller like the Psion Series 5, the HP Jornada 725, etc. it would take the world by storm. It would certainly be a huge hit in the Linux community. It may also help spur people to replace XFree86 since Embedix, etc. do not use X.
I work in the non-profit world. We have tight budgets but big tech plans. This past summer I finished a surveying application that was used on 18 PocketPC’s, operated by 54 highschool students (teams of 6). Now I’m tweaking my program for the Dept. of Public Works in a nearby town to improve their reporting process. My organization owns 24 iPaqs, and we bought them back when they were $499.
So with cheaper hardware, we can get other organizations on board with our project to do field data collection using handheld computers instead of pen and paper. Hook this up to wireless Internet access with a SQL server backend to store/retreive data and we’re golden.
Why is it everytime Palm is mentioned, people fail to mention handspring? having used on for around a year.
The one sole reason I bought it over the cheaper Palm as the fact that it it didnt feel cheap and flimsey. There was no case or cover with the Palm.
As for Dell, please tell me, how big is their R&D, yeap, thats right NONE! nothing! nada! The IT industry is fueled by R&D and a bloody good marketing department, not some CEO who can put together computers cheaper than the rest.
If the industry was run like Dell, we’d still be using 8086’s because it would be cheaper to keep churning out the same crap rather than innovating an designing new products.
ok now, stop the direct price comparisons between different product types (pocketpc and palm). Each price point is for a different market.
100 dollar pda is supposed to be for “anyone” and will be sold in walmart-type places, while the higher end pdas coming out will be sold by tech stores.
Dell is making a very interesting product to say the least, but you can be sure that competition will lower prices.
imaginereno: Palm Zire – $99.00, just released
Palm has them beat….
Completely different products with completely different target markets.
One of the most major difference is that the Dell comes with a colour LCD. It also comes with a better processor whom Palm has yet to use (ARM), far more RAM for storage and other stuff.
So would this comparison allow other PC vs Mac comparison between a eMac and a WalMart US$200 PC?
ryan: thanks for killing the margins in yet another industry dell.
Dell isn’t the first maker to come up with $200 PocketPC PDAs…. There was another one, but I can’t remember the name.
Besides low margins = higher sales = commodity status = another monopoly for Microsoft to mint money from.
Kevin: And what’s with the screen. It’s small. Why.
The price maybe? Unlike CRTs, for each square inch, the price increases tremedously.
Excalibur: Performance isn’t the issue, price and features are the main issue in that market, I’d think.
You brought up an interesting point: features. Because of the old outdated CPU, Palm OS can’t introduce multitasking and a number of corporate features that need more than 33MHz of 16-bit power.
ryan: The dell is still too expensive to do that[..]
Funny you should say that, most PDA sales are within the $200-$300 price range.
Matthew Gardinet: Why is it everytime Palm is mentioned, people fail to mention handspring? having used on for around a year.
The troubled company is going after the PDA+Phone combo market, not something Palm nor Dell is targeting.
Matthew Gardinet: As for Dell, please tell me, how big is their R&D, yeap, thats right NONE! nothing! nada!
Actually Dell has the largest R&D for a PC maker. But the innovation comes from Intel, and other companies. Trust me, without these companies, Dell wouldn’t exist. So the whole industry can’t be like Dell.
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Mt take: I would rather buy a Palm or a Toshiba sub-$300 PocketPC or a Clie. The Dell, from the pictures, looks ultra-ugly, circa m100 and m105 Palm came out with.
Unless Dell comes out with something like the Zire (the looks, I mean), never would I buy a Dell.
Actually Dell has the largest R&D for a PC maker. But the innovation comes from Intel, and other companies. Trust me, without these companies, Dell wouldn’t exist. So the whole industry can’t be like Dell.
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I find it hard to believe since they don’t design one component in their machines. Everything is licensed and pre-built. They’re simply putting together the machano set and selling it with a “Dell” badge on it. Nothing iriginal.
“Funny you should say that, most PDA sales are within the $200-$300 price range.”
guess you haven’t noticed PDA sales figures lately. They are going nowhere. No or at best little growth. Why? because the people that want one have one. If you go under $100 then you can attract people that who don’t value the PDA a whole lot. YOu can pick up customers who wouldn’t buy one otherwise. You can do that because $100 is low risk. However, i still think it should be under $100 to achieve this goal. You also get volumes. Palm is doing to the pocket PC what windows did to apple. The palm is good enough for the masses. The pocketPC has lots of nice features that only a select few really care about.
the $200-$300 price range represents the people that buy them today. YOu want a new market segment and that, i suspect, is one purpose of the Zire
I have read the Japanese Zaurus page referenced by this article, but I don’t see anything that says this will be released in the US.
Sharp has made Zaurus PDAs (or as they say, “electric wallet”, or something like that) in Japan for at least 14 years. I bought a Sharp Zaurus there back in 1988, and another in 1992, but I’m sure they have made them longer than that.
The page does mentions that this new Zaurus will be Linux based, instead of their old proprietary OS (which my other two use). It also mentions a screen resolution of 640×480 and a large keyboard; all things considered. This fits the form factor of the Zaurus machines that have been sold in Japan in the past rather than their latest PDA marketed in the US. The article also says that pricing and availability have not yet been determined, although they are shooting for the end of the year.
Sorry to go off on a tangent. My thoughts are that this is a PDA for the Japanese market only. I admit my Japanese is a bit rusty, but I didn’t see anything on the referenced site, which would suggest it will be sold here.
I have the Zaurus 5500 and it is a great PDA; although a little shorter on battery life than my HandSpring Prism. I like the looks of this new PDA. I am going to Japan again next year, so I hope its out before February.
Matthew Gardinet: I find it hard to believe since they don’t design one component in their machines. Everything is licensed and pre-built. They’re simply putting together the machano set and selling it with a “Dell” badge on it. Nothing iriginal.
Wrong. Just to counter your arguments
1) If Dell didn’t design it, who design one of the most inteligence tower chasis (the slim one, for OptiPlex)? Never seen ti anywhere before Dell.
2) How the heck did they design their laptops? It is the safest laptops to put on your laptops (there are certain models that don’t, just check them out before saying goodbye to Father’s Day).
3) How the heck did they get the designs for their PSU and motherboard on their computers? (you can’t take a third party motherboard or PSU and swap with Dell originals without blowing something off).
4) And much much more.
Yeah, it has a R&D smaller than Apple…. but that wasn’t my point.
They do have a big R&D.
ryan: They are going nowhere. No or at best little growth. Why? because the people that want one have one.
Actually, no. Why the PDA market is in the slump is also why every other market is in the slump. Lack of demand. No, that doesn’t mean people don’t want it. Because people can’t be bothered with them now. Why? A lot of people are facing pay cuts, and many more are facing recessions.
(The only market still growing is in China, which ironically is where the PDA market is growing).
Trust me when I say this: people who can’t afford a $200 PDA don’t want a PDA. PDA is more for executives than for housewives, and now they demand other features besides being a digital notepad/diary/phonebook/calculator…
(Besides, Palm always had a $100 PDA, but I wonder why $100 PDAs haven’t dominated the landscap yet)
Camel: Tried the fish yet? (http://babelfish.altavista.com/)
“why the PDA market is in the slump is also why every other market is in the slump. Lack of demand”
lack of demand and a slow down in growth was evident before the dip in the market and the same generally applies to the PC segment. There is lots of evidence that demonstrates that upgrade cycles are getting longer and longer and that is not just the result of the recession. in fact its probably part of the cause of the recession. Society is showing lots of signs of having maxed out on the current crop of tech. Something will have to change to reverse this trend.
” people who can’t afford a $200 PDA don’t want a PDA.”
Exactly the point. People don’t want a PDA. it is of little value to them so the only way you’ll get them to buy one is if the price meets their valuation of it, which is apparently a lot less than $200 and probably a bit less than $100.
The thing the zire has going for it, as opposed to those other $100 PDAs, is good looks, a nice charger (AAAs just suck) and good advertising campaign. I see no point in owning a PDA myself but i’d consider the zire for exactly those reasons. I’d also consider those new kyocera or samsung phones (the clam shells not the giant bricks) that have palm OS in them. Extending the market is the point and the audience is not the tech geek. Penetration of the tech geek is done. Palm needs to move on now and so does the entire tech sector.
Rajan: You brought up an interesting point: features. Because of the old outdated CPU, Palm OS can’t introduce multitasking and a number of corporate features that need more than 33MHz of 16-bit power.
True, but at the ~$99 price range, the market is consumers so that isn’t as big a deal, as it seems at this point. Corp customers may need multitasking and all that, and that is where the target market splits and the price goes up. (I don’t see a reason on a PDA, personally for all that but, I’m sure there are reasons) Saving contacts and managing phone numbers doesn’t need a major load of horsepower is all I meant for consumers, which is the market the Palm OS pretty much is targeted at this time.