Toshiba enters pocket market

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

Notebook PC manufacturer Toshiba has made a late entrance to the growing personal digital assistant market with its $1595 (plus GST) e570 Pocket PC.

Toshiba says the 180g e570 is smaller and lighter than its competitors, but its main selling point will be its wide range of accessories.

Australia and New Zealand marketing manager Mark Whittard said the e570 was the only handheld PC based on Microsoft's Pocket PC 2002 platform which had both a CompactFlash II and a Secure Digital expansion slot.

The expansion slot could be used to house a Bluetooth personal area wireless networking module or up to 256Mb of additional memory beyond the 64Mb provided as standard.

Accessories available for the CompactFlash II slot included a global positioning system card, a 1Gb hard disk drive, a bar code reader and a wireless local area network card or a modem.

The slot could also house cards to give access to the Vodafone or Telecom mobile data networks.

Mr Whittard said Toshiba had held back until now because sale volumes in the handheld market were too low.

"We left this area for smaller manufacturers to develop," he said.

But the success of Compaq's rival iPaq handheld and the increasing penetration of Microsoft's Pocket PC operating system - against those based on the Palm platform - had prompted the change.

Mr Whittard said he expected Toshiba to sell between 18,000 and 25,000 units in Australia and New Zealand next year, putting the company in second place behind Compaq in handheld PC sales.

"By 2003 we reckon we'll be challenging them," he said.

Mike Carden, consumer general manager at rival Hewlett-Packard - which has been marketing handheld PCs in New Zealand for about 18 months - is more cautious.

"Our most recent offering, the Jornada 560, is our most expensive model and it is also our most successful," he said.

"However, these devices are still selling to those individuals who want the best model in any category, and the market is small.

"We are selling the 560s at $2000 each, but the volumes mean we are going backwards on them."

Mr Carden said Compaq was selling about three Ipaqs for every Jornada 560 sold.

But that did not mean the Jornada would be killed if the proposed merger between the two companies took place.

"It's difficult to say," he said. "There is a lot of cross-linked technologies in all of these products.

"The Ipaq is more established, but in the eight months it would take for new products to appear from the merged company, everything could have changed."