Much of the growth in the PDA market in the second quarter of 2006 was generated by vendors that were not among the first-tier one year ago, such as Mio Technology, Motorola and Danger Research. Meanwhile, last year's first-tier vendors -- Research In Motion (RIM), Palm, Hewlett-Packard and Dell -- have had steady-to-declining shipments, Gartner adds.

'The ongoing integration of WAN technology into PDAs, and the marketing push of these devices by wireless operators has produced most of the growth compared to one year ago,' says Todd Kort, principal analyst in Gartner's Computing Platforms Worldwide group.

'The average selling price of PDAs fell by 6 percent from one year ago to US$373, mostly due to aging product lines, the increasing impact of wireless operator subsidies and relatively few new PDAs being launched thus far in 2006,' Kort says. 'As a result, worldwide PDA end-user revenue fell by 4.1 percent from one year ago to $1.38 billion in the second quarter of 2006.'