Got handhelds figured out? Wait 10 minutes

| GCN STAFFThe one sure thing about the landscape for handheld PCs is that it's constantly changing. If you're looking to buy a handheld, get ready for a ride over unsettled terrain.'It's a market in transition,' said Ken Dulaney, vice president of mobile computing for Gartner Inc. of Stamford, Conn.At the upper end, handhelds are no longer sober personal information managers that executives in gray suits synchronize with their PCs. The latest flashily colored handhelds are bursting with power, ports and multimedia support.Handhelds are turning into'get ready for a new acronym'PDE (personal digital entertainment) devices.Moreover, the rising demand for wireless messaging portends a new wave of options for buyers, including smart-phone devices with onscreen keypads that represent a convergence of handhelds and cellular phones.In addition, major changes could be ahead for Palm Inc., the market's long-time leader.Gartner's Dulaney, who's based in San Jose, Calif., believes that Palm will soon have to make some decisions about its processor architecture.In a recent Gartner report, Dulaney said that 'as the bearer of the Palm platform, [Palm] must manage a transition to an entirely new chip architecture to match' Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Pocket PC and other platforms such as Symbian Ltd.'s 32-bit EPOC operating system.'These competitors' platforms run the ARM architecture, which is seven times more powerful than Palm's architecture,' Dulaney said, referring to RISC chips from ARM Inc. of Los Gatos, Calif.Palm is still king of the handheld hill with its own units, but has lost about 7 percent of its market share since November, according to NPD Intellect Market Tracking of New York.NPD reported that as of February Palm held a 64-percent stake, down from 71 percent in November last year.At the same time, Handspring Inc. continues to make inroads with its Visor handhelds, which use the Palm OS. Handspring's share of the handheld space grew to nearly 20 percent in February, NPD said.Handspring recently reported a 261 percent jump in quarterly revenue.Palm is feeling pressure from companies whose devices use the Pocket PC OS, especially those from Compaq iPaq line, Dulaney said.'We're seeing Microsoft come into play via the Compaq iPaq,' he said. 'We're getting a lot more calls about the iPaq from people who want to use it.'Compaq recently announced that it plans to quadruple production of iPaq devices to 400,000 units a month.Meanwhile, more makers are offering devices using either Palm OS or Pocket PC, giving shoppers a slew of choices in the tablet-style form factor.Palm recently released the 4-ounce M500 and the M505, which has a color screen; both are based on the Palm V. Handspring has introduced its sleek Visor Edge, and Sony Corp. of America has come out with its Clie, another Palm OS device.Later this month, IBM Corp. plans to unveil a new version of its WorkPad handheld, based on Palm's M500 and M505, an IBM spokesman said.On the Pocket PC front, Casio Inc.'s Cassiopeia E-125V, Compaq's iPaq 3650 and Hewlett-Packard's Jornada 547 have hit the streets in the last year.What the latest handhelds have in common is expandability.Palm's new M500 and M505 devices feature a Secure Digital Card slot, which lets users take advantage of a wide range of expansion products supported by a consortium of more than 200 companies, the SD Card Association ().Among other new devices, Sony's Clie uses Memory Sticks to expand memory to 128M.'Expansion is a good feature, but a lot of people haven't used it yet,' Gartner's Dulaney said. 'I think expansion is the next stage of hardware growth, but I'm not sure it's driving the market because you're getting growth in the market at the low end, where devices don't have expansion slots.'Meanwhile, the market continues to shrink for clamshell-style keypad devices.Only Hewlett-Packard has continued to pursue a niche between palmtop devices and full-blown notebooks in the last year by launching its $999 Jornada 720.What can handheld buyers expect down the road? Dulaney thinks that most shoppers will stick with tablet-style handhelds as improvements are made in integrated wireless messaging and Web access. Not everyone will want a converged device or smart phone.'Smart phones are caught between handhelds and cell phones and probably aren't going to be that exciting,' he said. 'What's going to happen [eventually] is that most people will probably buy a cell phone with Bluetooth in it, and they'll have a [personal digital assistant] with Bluetooth in it, and they'll go from the PDA to the cell phone up to Internet.'For now, what users buy could be a matter of taste.'This is much more like the fashion market than the PC market,' Dulaney said. 'We don't all wear the same watch, and we won't all have the same PDAs.'XXXSPLITXXX-