STAMFORD, CT — Worldwide PDA shipments totaled 3.7 million units in the second quarter, a 2.7% increase from a year ago, according to Gartner Inc. This was the highest PDA shipment total of any second quarter.

Much of the growth in the PDA market was generated by vendors that were not among the first-tier one year ago, such as Mio Technology, Motorola and Danger Inc. Meanwhile, last year’s first-tier vendors — Research In Motion, Palm, Hewlett-Packard and Dell — have had steady-to-declining shipments.

“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,” said Todd Kort, principal analyst in Gartner's Computing Platforms Worldwide group.

“The average selling price of PDAs fell by 6% from one year ago to $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 said. “As a result, worldwide PDA end-user revenue fell by 4.1% from one year ago to $1.38 billion in the second quarter of 2006.”