Goodbye PDA
After a weekend of strolling through Tokyo’s biggest Electronic stores one point became eminent: more and more shops are saying “goodbye” to PDAs. Big chain stores like Biccamera or Sakuraya up until a few month ago had a wide range of PDA offerings from Palm, PocketPC to Zaurus models. Now they are only displaying the Zaurus line of PDAs. All other products have disappeared from the average showroom. A small discussion with shop staffs revealed the following: “We stopped selling those products. The Zaurus is still there because it is more like an ultra small Laptop than a PDA. If consumers need PDA functions they can find these in the mobile phones we sell here at the shop.”
Almost all Japanese phones already offer QVGA displays like normal PDAs as well as address book, calendar and note taking functions. Some can even display and edit office documents.
The assumption of the mobile phones being the PDA killer has been around for long. Now reality proves it right.
It will be interesting to see how smartphones will perform in the Japanese mobile market in the long run. As of now DoCoMo (Motorola using Symbian), Vodafone (Nokia using Symbian) and soon Willcom (Sharp using WM 5.0) offer smartphones. More are expected in 2006. Given the advanced state of normal mobile phones in Japan (they are already rather “smart”) finding the right way to market these “smarter smart phones” will be a big challenge.
