yeah, probably but you'd

yeah, probably but you'd think a true innovator like HP could turn that around, or maybe the handheld side of the business just isn't something they consider to be a large enough profit margin for them to pay much attention. As long as the Mobile Division isn't losing money, they can justify designing mediocre hardware/software or simply going with the status quo. Lot's of big companies do the same thing. They like to say "Hey! Look at us, we're technology leaders!", without actually spending any significant amount of R&D money on real technology innovation. A company like HP could probably milk that for a long time, and the diversification of their mobile market--especially large business and gov contracts--is probably broad enough to sustain them.

I still doubt it's just the PDA thing. Look at the Kindle and Sony book reader's? They are selling surprisingly well. Who'd of thought any company could carve out market share for such a device? There is still a really wide margin for innovation on portable/handheld devices that HP simply refused to explore with the iPAQ. They were one of the first guys on the block. You would think they would have gone farther, even if they stayed too long in the PDA-only playground. Their PDA's could have been innovative in many other ways than as phones. Maybe a mobile entertainment/blog/texting only platform? When you have the coolest, most reliable features in a niche (think iPod), you can quickly own the market with the under 30 crowd. They'll buy your gadget, often just so they can say they have your gadget! Which is what a lot of the Apple crowd is about. Oh yeah, and the fact Apple stuff works really well. There's that..mostly because it's based largely on a NIX kernel, and hardware/software is designed to work together much like Sun.

HP should not be so flip, however...Eventually HTC and the iPhone come along, and tweak their business-oriented stuff enough to blow you out of the market completely. Or God forbid BlackBerry gets serious about enhancing the entertainment aspects of their handsets.

Then you fall back on your laptops until they're crapola, and next the desktops are shunned until...you can't get someone to even buy you out. Not likely with HP, though. I think truthfully they just didn't really want to deal with the mobile scene and it's trendy fads... Their new UMPC though looks pretty damn sweet! It wouldn't be a totally bad idea to pull an HTC and add an option to boot into a Windows Mobile/CE shell for phone-oriented tasks or just quick Internet Access.

HP has some of the best servers and SAN storage products, and I think they are truly an innovative force in the enterprise computing market. They just neglected/botched their handheld line, IMHO.

Nate, I'm with you: I was a

Nate,

I'm with you: I was a loyal iPAQ groupie and my first two Pocket PCs were iPAQs and I loved them (h1945 and hx2755). My personal opinion of their fall from dominance is that it occurred before the iPhone and was a consequence of peoples' preferences shifting from "pure" Pocket PCs to Pocket PC/Phone converged devices. They just never quite made the shift and are now playing catch up. In the interim, I've personally switched to the HTC Touch and love it!

Ben

Smartphone &amp; Pocket PC magazine - Comments for "What happened to the iPAQ?"

yeah, probably but you'd

Nate, I'm with you: I was a

Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine - Comments for "What happened to the iPAQ?"