14 DAY TRIAL // The past year has been especially unusual for the market of entry-level mobile PCs, as analysts went from optimistic to uncertain and then, at least in some cases, to cautious, especially after media tablets carved their own share of the IT market.
Late last year (2009), the netbook market had finished a good run and seemed poised to only keep growing.
Then, during the first half of 2010, concerns begun to arise after the market showed signs of getting saturated.
Needless to say, makers of netbook hardware did the expected at released new products, like the DDR3-supporting and dual-core CPU members of the Intel Pine Trail platform.
Unfortunately, tablets, represented mainly by Apple's iPad, showed up around the same time and, according to market watchers, have already eaten up part of the netbook market share.
Now, Digitimes predicts that tablets will keep on gnawing at the market share of netbooks, to the point where they might actually exceed them in shipments as early as the ongoing fourth quarter of 2010.
The report does not stop at just that, however, making also some predictions in regards to all other so-called future terminal devices.
According to Digitmes Research, in addition to tablet PC, notebooks and smartphones will also turn into mainstream terminal devices.
Smartphone shipments will supposedly amount to about 800 million in 2013, and this would mean double the ones this year.
Likewise, tablets will sell in droves in 2013, shipments set to supposedly reach a full 100 million, while notebooks are predicted at 300 million.
Basically, as tablets continue to replace netbooks, they will also become appealing in the eyes of consumers as an upgrade, of sorts, from smartphones.
Nevertheless, senior analyst Joanne Chen says that slates are still unlikely to outmatch smartphones in popularity by that time and, thus, will hold just a 10-12% of the combined share during 2012-2013.