NPD recently published the results of their Q1 2012 mobile PC market research, and as you might expect, Apple's iPad has dominated competing mobile PC manufacturers. Again. After shipping 17.2 million iPads in the quarter, Apple has claimed 22.5% market share, compared to HP's 11.6%, Acer's 9% and Lenovo's 7.7%. Among tablet manufacturers, the iPad commanded 62.8% market share, followed by Samsung with 7.5%, Amazon with 4%, and RIM tied with ASUS with 2.3%.

It's still a little weird putting the iPad in the same category as netbooks considering the wide gap in form factor and software, but let's face it: the use case is identical, so you aren't going to be seeing a lot of people willing to buy both a mini laptop and a tablet. Samsung leap-frogged Amazon to the number 2 tablet manufacturer spot, which just goes to show that a low pricetag is far from the deciding factor in adoption.

"Post-PC" has been a fun buzzword for the last couple of months, but after seeing how well the iPad is doing versus more traditional portable computers, one can see why the idea is gaining traction. Do you guys see a point down the line (or even today) that you would ditch a MacBook Air or Windows ultrabook for a tablet? Do they even belong in the same product category at all? At what point does one leave the tablet at home and bring a laptop, or are we still waiting for another product category to merge the two in a practical way? My vote goes to the latter; I'm a  huge fan of the ASUS Transformer Prime form factor, and I think ultimately tablets with laptop-style docks with real keyboards and extra battery are going to be the way to go.

Source: NPD

HP CEO Meg Whitman admitted in a recent interview that if you count tablets, Apple may very well bust past them in PC sales after holiday sales are tallied up. A bunch of analyst estimates suggest Apple could break 20 million combined iPad and Mac unit sales over the holidays. That would put it over the   14.7 million that HP had churned out last quarter, and well ahead of other manufacturers like Acer, Dell, and Lenovo. Of course, if you don't count the iPad, and only Mac sales, Apple falls well behind the whole lot.  Over the holidays, it's estimated Apple cleared little over 5 million Mac units.

I'm still a little dubious about counting the current breed of tablets as full-blown PCs, despite being great computing devices. There's no lack of Macbook Air owners that aren't inclined to also carry around an iPad, and Windows 8 is showing that other big-boy laptops will soon be able to slim down to the size of tablets borne of smartphone operating systems.

These are interesting estimates to consider, but we won't know for sure how well Apple's Mac and iPad sales did until they announce their quarterly results on January 24. What do you guys think - is it fair to lump in the iPad with Mac sales when talking about the PC market?

Source: TechCrunch via Asymco

If you're interested in following the Olympics on your iPhone, you could do worse than the free Lenovo Summer Olympics 2008 (App store link) application.

A classy Olympics app is postworthy, sure, but what makes this app very interesting is that it's been developed by Zumobi -- note the tell-tale 'Z' in the screenshot, note also that, ah, Zumobi is the developer. Why is this significant? Zumobi is a company that specializes in creating a neat 'tiled content' app for Windows Mobile. Ok, so?

Zumobi is an independent software shop whose core technology was created at Microsoft and subsequently spun-off. The company is still pretty much backed by Microsoft and there are plans to include there app 'on deck' for Windows Mobile someday. So while it's not technically accurate to say we're looking at our first Microsoft-developed application for the iPhone, it's not crazy to point out the connection either. Add in the Lenovo and Intel sponsorship of the app and we have a very interesting 5-way relationship going on here: Apple, Zumobi, Microsoft, Lenovo, and Intel.

...And you thought the Olympics were about sports. For shame.

via tuaw