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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

FLUSHED WITH THE fumes of an incredibly old printer cartridge that we found down the back of a filing cabinet, The INQUIRER has spent a portion of its afternoon considering what cars laptops would be if they were cars and not laptops.

We’ve picked through some of the more recent hardware to find its way into our offices and come up with some pretty blunt reasons why some devices are more like a Lada than others. We like it, you might too, whether the laptop manufacturers will, we cannot say.

Apple
Love or hate Apple, it can’t be denied that Macbooks are the Aston Martin of laptops. Like the Aston Martin, the Macbook is expensive and tasteful – a rare combination. As James bond fans will know, an Aston Martin has beautiful design and outstanding engineering. On top these fine qualities, Macbooks have lots of power underneath their bonnets.

Sony
When The INQUIRER office discussed the Vaio over our lunch time pint, we used words to describe Sony’s protégé including expensive, flash, and loud, especially with those luminous covers. That’s why we christened it the Ferrari. Like the flash car, the Sony Vaio shouts “look at me”, and is a must for anyone concerned with laptop cool.

HP
Good old HP. It might be staying in the PC industry and with good reason, but we have decided it’s most definitely a Volvo. HP laptops have sharp lines, but a bland design. They are suitable for families but in reality, you’d rather have something more exciting.

Asus
Asus is the Mitsubishi of the laptop world. Both are not that expensive, and make you look quite cool. Mitsubishis are also for those who like to tinker with their cars. How much can you soup up an Asus? We’ll have a go this afternoon and report back with our findings.

Last month Brian put together a performance preview of Qualcomm's first dual-core SoC: the 1.5GHz MSM8660. The article was mostly focused on GPU performance as the new Adreno 220 is something we were very interested in. The first MSM8660 based smartphones will ship this year, but we benchmarked the SoC using Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon Mobile Development Platform (MDP).

Starting today, the MSM8660 MDP will be available for purchase by any developer through BSQUARE for 50. Qualcomm's MDP is a nice way of getting a head start on developing for the next-generation of Android handsets based on Snapdragon SoCs.

What if you're an Android developer on a budget? Qualcomm was nice enough to provide us with a MSM8660 MDP to give away to one lucky reader. Read on for details on how to enter the contest.

It started off as a simple enough memory review, but somewhere along the way we decided to dramatically expand  the scope of our discussion and avoid the monotony of a typical memory piece. The end result? An in-depth look at some of the more fundamental aspects of SDRAM operation. If you'd like to expand your understanding of memory transaction minutia while learning more about which key performance factors need to be tuned and why, then have we got the article for you! Set some good time aside, grab a tall mug of your favorite, frosty beverage, and prepare for an exercise in reasoning. You're not going to want to miss what we have to share.