Word: pdas
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...While the locals fight it out, multinationals?with the exception of Microsoft?remain warily on the sidelines, unsure if they can profit in China's savage market. Today, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard have a combined market share of under 3%; Palm and IBM don't even sell PDAs on the mainland and there isn't enough Mandarin software to spur consumer interest. "We know this is a weakness," concedes Franklin Sze, product director for Compaq's iPAQ in Greater China. Preoccupied with tough times at home and hobbled by supply problems, U.S. PDA manufacturers have focused international efforts instead...
...Still, foreign players have begun to wake up to China's potential. In Japan, which once seemed so promising, they have made little headway with consumers so inextricably hooked to their cell phones. But in China, sophisticated wireless PDAs are shaping up as a potentially important way to access the Internet. Already, China has quietly become the second-largest market in the world for handheld computers, according to market research outfit IDC. Last year, close to 1.5 million PDAs were sold, a number expected to double in 2001. Add in cheap but popular electronic organizers, and the number swells...
...China in 1995. A high-school dropout, he and his family slipped away to Hong Kong from his native Fujian during the Cultural Revolution. Today, the family has built a small empire with interests in property and light manufacturing. Sher struggled for years to build a market for PDAs. Even today, manufacturers complain that their main competition in China is the Filofax. "We started from zero. A complete nothing," Sher says. Today the employer of 900, he likes to needle rivals, notably Hi-Tech Wealth president Zhang Zhengyu, a software engineer who got his start distri-buting Sher's products...
...sleek regulation-blue Police PDA. Flip open the lid, press a button and the detailed files of some 300,000 criminal suspects are just a tap away. Given the size of China's vast law-and-order bureaucracy, Zhang hopes eventually to sell several hundred thousand Police PDAs to the security ministry. Next up, says Zhang, is a medical PDA that will store case records and allow doctors to write on-the-spot case notes and prescriptions, using Chinese character-recognition software...
...primitive in others. A creative local manufacturer has developed a PDA that Beijing traffic cops use to record fines and track stolen cars in a new cashless system that eliminates the chance for bribes. Innovators have experimented with voice recognition and designed built-in modems so users can plug PDAs directly into phone lines for Internet access, a useful feature in a country where less than 2% of the population owns a computer. But the China market is hindered by a lack of common software standards. Each PDA maker has gone its own way, creating homegrown?and incompatible?programs...