Happy New Year to all of our members and visitors at pdaPhoneHome. It has been a busy year in the pdaPhone market. My perspective is mostly based on the US market, so that is what I'll reflect on here.
First lets talk about the carriers. We started 2004 in the US with 6 major carriers, and ended the year with 4. AT&T Wireless was acquired by Cingular, and Sprint PCS has announced a merger with Nextel. It is too early to tell what this will do to the industry. Are we better off with 4 healthier competitors than 6 smaller ones? Time will tell. The interesting thing is that other than Sprint PCS, the carriers involved in the mergers weren't real big at pushing pdaPhone innovation.
pdaPhone handset maturity is something that we have seen on 2004. Both with Palm and Pocket PC, we have seen refinements to already good products. PalmOne's Treo 600 has been a huge success and helped to drive pdaPhones to the mainstream, and the Treo 650 is a refinement to that success. While the US market skipped HTC's second generation Pocket PC Phone, two carriers are opting in for their third generation device, and more may follow. Both Verizon and Sprint PCS are offering the CDMA version of the XDA III.
2004 was also a year of some changes. RIM turned its traditional Blackberry design on its head by releasing the 7100T, a totally new design that is much more like a Microsoft Smartphone, than the long time favorite for corporate email. The one thing missing from RIM's 2004 was the appearance of a Blackbery client for Palm and Pocket PC. Rumors have flown about when and where the client would first appear, but nothing materialized.
Symbian continued to be a major player around the world, but a minor player in the US. No carriers picked up any of the popular Symbian pdaPhones, like the Sony Ericsson P910. A few US carriers continue to test the water with numeric keypad only models like the Nokia 6600, however, so I'm hopeful that someone will make a bigger Symbian play in 2005.
Where was Samsung in 2004? Maybe having irons in every fire is too much for even this giant to pull off. Samsung has been one of the biggest players in the pdaPhone space in the past, and has shown us exciting new prototypes that seem to be headed for death on the vine. I hope that the floodgates can get opened with Samsung in 2005, because their innovation is much needed in the pdaPhone market. Another big pdaPhone player that we'd like to see back in the race is Kyocera. I think we'd all like to see a replacement for the Kyocera 7135 at some point... perhaps 2005 will be the year.
HP finally got in the race with a pdaPhone iPAQ in 2004. This is a company that launched the first Pocket PC Phone Edition before the merger with Compaq, a very good product for a first edition, but then the merger seemed to kill any hope for a followup. After floating a different rumor every month about being in our out of the market, they finally jumped in with both feet and a product that pulled together the big three... Cellular, WiFi, and Bluetooth.
Even though 2004 was the busiest and most exciting year ever for pdaPhones, we have to remember that this is still a very young industry. Remember that there were no pdaPhones before 2001, and the industry is still a niche in the total cellphone space. I believe that we will see pdaPhones becoming more mainstream in 2005, and see more and more exciting products. I hope that we will see more compact flip phone designs to take over where the Kyocera 7135 and Samsung i500 have left off.
We had a busy year at pdaPhoneHome as well. I want to thank all of our loyal members for helping to keep our discussion forums active, busy, and on subject. We had hoped to implement many upgrades to the site during 2004, but that didn't happen. The only big change we were able to get rolled out was the pdaPhone shop at pdaPhone.com. We will try to make a new look, and an upgrade to the forum software a priority in 2005.
Looking back at 2003, we had 220K unique visitors in December 2003. We just finished December 2004 with 470K unique visitors. This is quite a amazing to me, and I again want to thank everyone for contributing... especially our dedicated team that helps to moderate the forums and bring us the latest info on new pdaPhones.
Happy New Year!
What predictions do you guys want to make for 2005.... for pdaPhones that is??? 
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