Handheld market free fall continues

For the fourth successive quarter in 2004, sales declined on a year-over-year basis to 2.8 million units, the market researcher said. For the full year, the figure was 9.2 million units, compared to 10.6 million units in 2003. This is the third successive year of decline since the market's peak in 2001, IDC said.

"Despite a rise in quarterly shipments due to holiday seasonality and consumer uptake of bundled and integrated GPS receivers, increasingly saturated markets and stiff competition from converged mobile devices drove the handheld device market to its third straight year of decline," analyst David Linsalata said in a release. "This drop stresses the urgent need for vendors to evolve their devices beyond personal information management in order to return the market to a growth path."