There are two kinds of people in the world—those who believe in the power of the PDA and those who don't—and the first group is shrinking faster than a cotton shirt in an industrial dryer. If you're the sort of person who won't part from a beloved Tungsten E until it is pried from your cold, dead fingers, now may be a good time to start stocking up on replacements. According a variety of new reports, the PDA market is drying up. In the year between the second quarter of 2006 and the second quarter of 2007, for instance, PDAs saw an astonishing 43.5 percent decrease in worldwide shipments, and no more than a million devices were sold in the quarter.

This bit of bad news comes courtesy of IDC, which has released some new numbers on the PDA market. They make for grim reading. In addition to the year-over-year drop, sales of PDAs dropped off about 20 percent from the first quarter of the year. Given these sorts of numbers, it can't be long before some manufacturers start to pull a Google Video and stop selling products.

In fact, that's already happening. Dell is spinning down its Axim line of PDAs, though its 23,975 units shipped still placed it in fourth place worldwide for the quarter. Fujitsu-Siemens, which is ranked fifth in the world with 21,482 units moved this last quarter, just announced that it too is exiting the PDA business.

But the moves aren't necessarily a sign that other companies can snap up market share; the whole market appears to be dying. As IDC's Ramon Llamas noted when the new numbers were issued, "The market as a whole is still contracting, and other vendors, with fewer resources and less distribution, may be forced to withdraw from the market altogether. With double-digit negative growth continuing to characterize the market, IDC expects the handheld device market to contract further before it reaches a stable point."

Palm, the number one PDA vendor, is reaching for relevancy with its new Foleo (see our first impressions). But Palm faces a bleak future if PDA sales trends continue. The PDA might not disappear completely, but it looks likely to live on as a niche product.

The decline has been evident for some time. In 2005, we noted that PDA sales had been dropping for years. In 2006, we pointed out that smartphones had eclipsed PDAs and that the PDA market appeared to be shrinking. The new numbers from IDC indicate that, if anything, the shrinkage is expanding (which sounds downright physically impossible, no?). All hail the the mighty "smartphone" and a strong laptop market.

Further reading: