Saturday, February 11, 2006
Handwriting On The Wall For Tablet PCs - Must Lighten Up
Prettyinteresting article from Investors Business Daily on the next slew of lighter mobile devices. As you read this article and other bits slowly coming out from TG Daily and mine and Dennis’ reporting from the Mobile Partners brief, you should be getting a pretty good idea of what’s at play now.
Some other interesting tidbits from this article:
Makers of tablet PCs -- machines that run on the tablet-PC flavor of Microsoft's Windows operating system software -- aim to broaden the category with "ultramobile" tablets that are smaller than current tablet PCs but larger than today's handheld computers or personal digital assistants. Microsoft (NasdaqNM:MSFT - News) and its partners expect to unveil such products this spring.
- About 75% of the tablet PCs sold today are convertibles. The rest are slate-type tablets that don't come with attached keyboards.
- Toshiba is the leading seller of tablet PCs. In the third quarter in the U.S., it had 34% market share in the convertible category, IDC says. No. 2 Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ - News) had 23%.
Tablet PCs accounted for 1.5% of notebook PCs sold worldwide last year, says International Data Corp. PC makers shipped nearly 1 million tablet PCs in 2005 compared with 64.8 million notebook PCs total, IDC says. It expects shipments to nearly double to 1.9 million this year and make up 2% of notebook sales.
