Spb Software House has released the results of its third Spb Pocket PC Survey, a global survey for Pocket PC users.
Combined with the past two surveys, a number of trends become evident. More and more Pocket PC devices come with Wi-Fi, average storage card capacity has increased three-fold in the last two years (341M in 2004 vs. 1.2G in 2006) with the miniSD and microSD formats gaining popularity. Bluetooth headphone sales have also more than doubled in the past two years.
Increasing use of Windows Mobile 5 has resulted in fewer people syncing over Wi-Fi since ActiveSync 4.0 does not have this feature and, despite Windows Mobile 5.0 using persistent memory, more people are backing up their data.
Not surprising is the fact that the use of Pocket PC devices as phones continues to increase (from 14 percent in 2004 to 56 percent in 2006) even as most people continue to use their device as an organizer first. Web and email usage have surpassed games and music in 2006 though. System and file explorer utilities remained the top two application types installed by users.
On the hardware side, the top 3 brands are HTC with 28 percent , the Dell Axim with 20 percent and the HP iPAQ with 17 percent (down from 57 percent in 2004). The top three devices are the Dell Axim X51v, Dell Axim 50v and HP iPAQ hx4700. Will we see a Smartphone at the top of the device list this time next year?