April 4, 2002 –San Jose, CA–Market researcher, Dataquest, says it expects sales of hand-held computers to reach 15.5 million in 2002, an increase of 18 percent over last year’s 13 million devices shipped.
Once inventories are burned out, Dataquest believes PDA market will "regain some of its strength in the second half of 2002 and growth will be even stronger in 2003 as the economy recovers and business purchases increase."
"Roughly three-fourths of all PDAs purchased worldwide in 2001 were sold to individuals who bought them with their own funds, and the remainder were purchased or reimbursed by enterprises," noted Todd Kort, principal analyst for Gartner Dataquest’s Computing Platforms Worldwide group.
"The increasing capabilities of these devices and the growing availability of wireless technologies are beginning to stimulate large corporate purchases as solid productivity gains are realized, based on applications such as wireless e-mail or accessing corporate databases from remote locations," Kort adds.