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BEANCOUNTERS at NPD Displaysearch have released data estimating that 73 million tablets were shipped last year.

The firm reckons that shipments hit 72.7 million units, making up 25.5 per cent of the mobile PC market. Year on year growth is expected to reach 256 per cent.

“In the short term, tablet PCs will be the growth accelerant in the overall mobile PC market, as macroeconomic factors and hard drive motor supply issues impact the market for notebook PCs,” said Richard Shim, senior analyst at NPD Displaysearch.

“In the longer term, notebook PC shipments will bounce back as ASPs [average selling prices] continue to decline, Windows 8 launches, and new form factors, such as ultrabooks, continue to emerge.”

The report says that notebook PC shipments are expected to reach 432 million by 2017 compared to 383.3 million for tablet PCs. The analyst firm said that Ultrabooks will be held back by high price points over the next two years even though consumers will be attracted by the sleek designs and features such as instant on.

Demand and shipments of tablets will be driven by multi-core processors, ‘mature’ operating systems, larger app libraries and higher resolution displays. The company predicts that tablets with a 250ppi to 300ppi screens will make up nearly 25 per cent of the market this coming year. µ

INTERNET DEPARTMENT STORE Amazon has apparently increased order numbers of its Kindle Fire Tablet to five million units in the US, following strong pre-orders for the device.

According to Techcrunch, the number is an increase of one million from the four million Amazon had previously expected to sell before the end of 2011. The tablet will start shipping next Tuesday, 15 November.

This is despite no announcement from the bookseller regarding a launch date, or indeed pricing, for the Kindle Fire tablet in the UK. At this rate, it seems we might be lucky to get the device before the all important Christmas period, not to mention the Amazon Appstore that we are also waiting for here in Blighty.

Last month, analysts estimated that pre-orders for Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet had topped 95,000 on the first day the device was made available. This compared to the 300,000 that Apple reported for first day sales of its Ipad.

Amazon announced the launch of the 9 Kindle Fire on 28 September and it made the device available for pre-order immediately on its web site.

The Kindle Fire – a 7in IPS ultra-wide display, dual-core processor tablet – weighs 14.6oz and runs a customised version of Android. All of the content on the device is backed up in the cloud so users can delete things when they want. Content available will include 100,000 movies and TV shows, a million songs, apps from the Amazon Appstore and magazines.

When it launched the Kindle Fire, Amazon also launched a Kindle that is not a touchscreen device and is 30 per cent lighter than the original Kindle at 5.98oz. It costs a more pricey £89 in the UK, so we are guessing that the Kindle Fire will cost more than £199 when it eventually launches here. µ

LIMBO, the haunting indie platformer that netted a slew of awards for its minimalist design, has sold over a million copies, announced the developer Playdead. The success has allowed Playdead to achieve full financial independence from early investors, and it’s also motivated them to bring LIMBO to Mac.

"With the success that LIMBO has achieved, we felt this was the ideal time to fully regain our independence,” said Dino Patti in a statement released yesterday. “We are grateful to everyone who supported us over the past few years, and look forward to forging new partnerships that will both let us reach new heights as a studio and give our director, Arnt Jensen, room to grow creatively.”

LIMBO, originally released on Xbox Live Arcade, has since been released on PlayStation Network and PC via Steam. It is likely that the Mac version will use Steam, as well. There's no release date yet, but Playdead claims it “will be released before the end of the year.”

Despite its brevity, I think LIMBO is a brilliant title that makes excellent use of purposefully limited resources. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, you can download a demo of LIMBO for PC right here or on your console of choice.

FLOGGER OF SHINY TOYS Apple could sell as many as four million of its latest Iphone 4S smartphones this weekend.

The cappuccino company is poised to shift over twice as many Iphone 4S phones as it did Iphone 4 devices in their first months on sale, according to Bloomberg and an analyst roundup.

The four million figure comes from Yankee Group analyst Carl Howe, who told the INQUIRER, “I’ve heard figures that Apple built more than 4M units for launch; All carriers currently show sold out.”

Charlie Wolf from analysts Needham & Co pitched the numbers lower but added, “It’s going to easily outpace any previous launch,” in his interview with Bloomberg.

Lower estimates put sales at two or three million, but again both of these are higher than the number of Iphone 4 devices sold in the relevant financial quarter.

In that fiscal quarter, Apple’s third quarter of last year, the firm sold 8.4 million handsets. If Apple does sell half as many as that this weekend it will prove that there is some real cash, and not just people, in the queues outside its stores. µ

TOYMAKER FOR THE WELL HEELED Apple has once again shown that fanbois’ wallets are recession-proof by posting another set of bumper financial results.

Apple’s strap line for its third quarter 2011 results was “all-time record revenue and earnings”, and the figures certainly made impressive reading. During the three months ending 25 June 2011, the firm’s tills rang up .57bn and even more impressive was a profit of .79bn.

To put Apple’s 2011 figures into perspective, in the same quarter last year Apple reported revenue of .70bn and profit of .25bn, so not only has the firm close to doubled its revenue, costs have shrunk resulting in profit growing faster than revenue. The figures show that there is absolutely no chance of the Church of Jobs having to sell the lead off its roof anytime soon.

As to just how Apple hit .57bn in sales, the firm revealed it had sold over 20 million Iphones in the quarter and 9.25 million Ipads. The only blot on what is undoubtedly an impressive sales record is a 20 per cent drop in Ipod sales from the same quarter in 2010 to 7.54 million.

Apple’s drop in Ipod sales is expected, as the firm has long since moved away from the Ipod, the product that revitalised its fortunes, and onto the Iphone and Ipad. Sales of those devices showed no sign of declining and with a new Iphone expected in the next quarter, it’s highly unlikely Apple will suffer too much during the summer months.

Such is the confidence that Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO said that the firm expects revenue of around bn during its fourth quarter.

Things at Apple are rosey at the moment but looking ahead the, quite literally, bn question, is who will succeed Apple’s charismatic CEO Steve Jobs. The Wall Street Journal reports that some board members are already looking into the delicate task of succession planning.

There is no talk of Jobs leaving Apple in the short term but given his image as the leader who drives the company’s success, any successor will have to bed in for several quarters in order to reassure investors before Jobs leaves the firm. Not surprisingly, the board is sworn to secrecy, according to the report, and what will be most interesting is whether Apple will decide to promote from within or hire someone from outside.

So while Apple’s third quarter results show that the cappuccino company’s spell over its fanbois has no sign of diminishing, the task of finding Jobs’ successor is gaining in importance. µ

KOREAN ELECTRONICS GIANT Samsung has announced it has sold over 3 million of its Galaxy S II smartphones, having previously announced 3 million pre-orders.

Confusion has set in over the sales figures since we can’t work out whether this new figure is the same one as the old one, which suggests that since the pre-sales no more have been sold, or whether we should be writing that Samsung has sold six million of the handsets.

We asked Samsung, which, given a day to work out the maths for us, failed. In the press release, where things are much simpler, JK Shin, president and head of mobile communications at Samsung said, “This milestone reflects the continued strong support from our carrier partners around the world who have chosen the GALAXY S II as their flagship Android device.”

The phone has a dual-core processor and a 4.3-in screen with Super AMOLED Plus technology. The phone is a major rival to Apple’s Iphone, but we are expecting to see the next version(s) of that device later this year.

The two companies have been locked in legal battles over their mobile devices recently. The latest development is that Samsung has dropped the lawsuit against the fruit themed firm in which it asked to see the Iphone 5 and Ipad 3. µ

ANDROID USE IS GROWING at a phenomenal rate, with more than half a million new devices bearing the Google operating system being activated every day.

The revelation came from a tweet by Andy Rubin, SVP of mobile at Google and the guy in charge of the Android project.

It was just over six months ago that Rubin reported daily activations at 300,000, which was a significant number at the time. It was 100,000 more than the 200,000 daily activations it recorded in August of 2010, but now the increase is 200,000, showing that the rate of growth is steadily increasing.

And that growth is set to continue, with Rubin claiming that the figure is increasing by 4.4 per cent week on week, which means that we could yet see Android reach a cool million daily activations by the end of the year, if not substantially more.

Google’s release of Android 3.X Honeycomb is likely to have had some impact on the figures, as this was specifically designed for tablets, which previously had to make do with a smartphone version made somewhat bigger.

Smartphones are still likely the highest contributor, however, with many new Android models hitting the market such as the HTC Evo 3D, which is set to arrive in the UK next month.

Android has been stealing market share from competitors for some time. In April it dominated a third of the market, according to Comscore figures, and Gartner believes it will rule close to half of the smartphone market by the end of 2012. While it might seem like an exaggeration to some, the latest figures from Rubin show just what kind of potential is still left in the little green robot. µ

Nick Farrell THE INQUIRER

That is a lot for an Apple gadget