Palm SG Enters China's Handheld Market

You got a point. It will be interesting to see how PSG does there.

My Tungsten got a "Made in China" tatoo, so does my colleague's Zire.

Well isn't it all a bit dangerous, what with the SARS outbreak and everything...

I don´t understand this...

"According to IDC, China is the largest handheld-device market in the Asia Pacific region (excluding Japan) and accounts for 68 percent of total shipments in the region in calendar 2002"

and then

"China is the world's second largest handheld market, and accounted for about 20% of the world's handheld units last year."

so, which is the biggest handheld market in the world, Japan? If you include Japan in the Asian Pacific region numbers, then China is in second place, and since China is second worldwide ergo...

Am I ok? Where´s the US?

I might be wrong on this, but didn't Japanese cars came into the North America market as the "cheap little ones" ?? Now Korean cars are been marketed as "great deal" for the money.

Now, I'm not saying Chinese made goods will follow the path of that of Japanese and Korean goods. But history tends to repeate itself. Maybe, just mayby, in the decades to come, China might be makeing most of the stuff that we use anyway and the quility of these goods will be accpeted by most people.

Unicode or not, it's great to hear that there's finally a "CJKOS Chinese software system and PenPower handwriting software built into the handheld." Is this an officially localized version of Palm OS in CJK? If so, where can I get pick one up? Or alternatively, I wonder if they will ever make it available to us. Then we can update our Tungsten|T ROM with this OS, for a price, naturally. That would be awesome. (And in case some of you may have missed it or are confused, the American T|T advertises as only having 4MB of ROM, but it's actually 8MB like the ones they sell outside the USA. You can check ROM size in applications such as FileZ to verify this claim).

I've been going through the forums and have never been able to get any information on this subject (other than 3rd party apps which sit on top of English POS, but they're usually unstable). I've been waiting so long for a PDA with a Palm OS system that supports Korean language natively. Any information would be greatly appreciated. :)

Jim

Palm SG already have office in Hong Kong for a long long time. This article refers to mainland China.

Alan
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Read your manuals before you ask!!

Hey, Wake up very body....

China is the fastest growing country in the world. Still some third world places but most of the Eastern cost region are quite developped. And China Electronic are moving very fast.

Ex. Last year all the chinese phones were crap and there are now quite OK. It's going very, very fast here. And when we need 1 year to developp one generation of PDA in Europe and US, they running 2 or 3 generations (even if is still behind for the time being).

Soon everybody will know Haier, Legend, TCL. Every month, there is 5 millions of new mobile users !!! During this time, our old western countries are just sleeping.

Look here to get a hint for overall figures :
http://www.digitimes.com/Backgrounders/Telecom/T0001.asp

And for Amoisonic : http://www.amoisonic.com/
And for Haier : http://appserver.legend.com/Product/Product_PDA/Product_detail.asp?productid=1833
And for TCL : http://www.tcl.com/china/products/index.jsp
And for Bird : http://www.chinabird.com/

DP, an European lost in China

ingen, I agree. SMS is nothing new to anyone outside of the USA. Europe and Asia have already been SMS-ing for a long time now (though, not sure about S. America), and cell phones are the reasons for this, not PDA's.

: and there is an influx of cheap phones with SMS
: capabilities for the past few years in china and
: where Pocket Pc is dominant..

This is true, not only there, but in S. Korea as well. But, getting back on the PDA side of the topic, in S. Korea, while some companies that produce their own PDA and OS's have the majority of the PDA market, Pocket PC is more prevalent than Palm. Palm has almost zero marketshare there.

Then again, a friend of mine who visits S. Korea often would tell me that the reason PDA's aren't that big a deal is because almost EVERYONE has a cellphone and they use that as their "PDA" mainly for phonebook and calendar events. Those that need more are a small percentage. If anyone living in Korea could verify this, that would be great.

Jim

Zippy, just how long is it since you've been in China? I think you'll find things have changed a tad since your last visit, which was around the time of the Long March I would guess.

(seriously, I got a chuckle out of your post. Thanks!)

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- Steve Smith
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.