June 4, 04

This year's show demonstrated just why the Taiwan electronics industry has managed to swim against to tide of falling PDA sales, the organizers claimed.

While the global personal digital assistant (PDA) market has weakened, Taiwan manufacturers have bucked the trend by boosting sales in the first quarter of 2004.
Year on year growth for the period was 70% to 1.8 million units, according to Taiwan's Market Intelligence Center (MIC).

That is in stark contrast to the 12% fall, year on year, seen worldwide according to IDC, which estimates worldwide first quarter shipments at 2.2 million units.

Why Taiwan makers grow against the trend, visitors were able to see quite clearly.
The Taiwanese are using a two-pronged strategy for boosting the market. The first is to increase shipments of low-ed devices which sell cheap, but in larger volume, The second is to boost average selling prices on high-end PDAs by bulding in extra features.

According to MIC, 60% of Taiwan-made PDAs shipped in the first quarter had bluetooth, Wi-Fi or global positioning (GPS) built-in.

Leading the charge are some of the names behind the names that dominate the PDA industry.

Among them is Asustek Computer ( www.asus.com ) , which is better known for being one of the world's top notebook PC makers. Havig recogniy\zed the trend toward convergent electronics products some years back, Asus has added cellphones, communications and PDAs to its product line. At this year's show, it showed off the progresses it had made in PDA product development. There were two handheld offerings, the MzPal A716 and A730. The first one powered by a 400 MHz Intel PXA255 and 64MB of memory with both Bluetooth and 802.11b wireless connectivity. The A730 uses an Intel Xscale CPU. The multifunction device also features a a built-in. 1.3 megapixel camera.

Another big name during the show was Hong Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn. Little known outside of Tawan, Foxconn ( www.foxconn.com ) is fast becoming the powerhuse in electronics and PC manufacturing although it is still notorious for keeping a low profile even it its home market.

Bursting onto the scene this year is AnexTEK (www.anextek.com )with its PDA phone, the SP230, the first own development. It features Microsoft's Windows Mobile 2003 Pocket PC OS phone edition and powered by a 400 MHz Intel PXA255.Previously living under the shadow of its mother company, Wistron ( itself a spinoff from Acer ) AnexTEK is ambitiously hoping to ship 80,000 of its PDA phones this year, all under its own brand name. So far its SP230 Windows Mobile Pocket PC-powered PDA is the headline product, but more are expected later it the year.