Special Promotions to Ignite the Handheld Market
To ignite a spark in the smoldering handheld market,
manufacturers are launching special promotions in order to move
excessive inventory.
Recently, Handspring, Inc., manufacturer of the popular Visor
handhelds, and Compaq, known for its iPAQ handheld PocketPCs, have
launched promotional campaigns to move their respective products.
Handspring has taken the traditional approach of slashing prices
to attract the back-to-school crowd, students and teachers alike.
The Mountain View, California-based company announced price
reductions off its popular Visor handhelds, discounts range from
$20.00 off the 2MB Visor to $100.00 off the Visor Edge.
Compaq and Cathay Pacific Airways have launched a dual
promotional campaign. From September 1st through to
November 15th, travelers purchasing a round trip
business- or first- class ticket from Los Angeles, San Francisco,
New York, Toronto or Vancouver and Hong Kong on Cathay Pacific
Airlines will receive a Compaq PocketPC handheld.
"With an increased popularity mobile computing, we believe
this promotion will encourage our passengers to book a premium-class
seat to Hong Kong so that they can experience easy access to the
Internet, content, and information whenever their business or
leisure travel takes them abroad," says Tom Wright, Cathay
Pacific’s senior vice president.
The airline anticipates that more than 2,000 premium airline
passengers will take advantage of the offer.
For more information: http://www.handspring.com
http://www.compaq.com
Mobileinfo Comments and Advisory: Handheld PDA and
smart phone prices are coming down and putting pressure on profit
margins of device manufacturers. Low-end devices will soon become
commodity products. The manufacturers will have to increase their
volumes when economy picks up or get into services area. However, we
also need more functional (and justifiably more expensive) versions of
these devices for the enterprise applications. We should remind
enterprise device evaluators to keep in mind that device hardware
price is only a small portion of the total cost of operation (not
ownership - not TCO but our term TOO that includes network cost,
application development cost, and more). Please do not "nickel
and dime" over device prices when it comes to the enterprise. It
might make a difference between mobile workers using it productively
or only when it is absolutely essential - the latter mode is not
desirable.
