Gartner sees 4.5 percent rise in PC, tablet, mobile phone shipment in 2013

There year isn’t over yet, but Gartner is already feeling and sending good vibes about the state of shipments of tablets and mobile phones for 2013, at least compared to last year. The same, however, cannot be said for the PC market, which is continually experiencing a period of decline.

Overall, the outlook is quite good. In its third quarter report, Gartner projects that the total number shipments encompassing PCs, tablets, and mobile phones to climb up by 4.5% from 2.22 billion units in 2012 to 2.32 billion this year. Driving the spurt will be tablet shipments, which it forecasts to grow by 53.4 percent with shipments of 184 million units worldwide. Curiously, it believes that these tablets will mostly be of the mid- to low-range variety, particularly those sporting sizes of 8 inches or lower, which seems to be a favorite among consumers in Brazil, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the US. Even smartphones, the long-time darling of the geek world, might have trouble finding warm hands this coming holiday season, according to the firm.

Needless to say, Android will, of course, be behind majority of those figures. Windows, both its desktop and mobile incarnations, still come at second against Apple’s iOS and Mac OS combo, but Gartner expects that to decline by 4.3 percent this year, mostly due to decline in PC shipments. Neither the demise of Windows XP next year nor the acquisition of Nokia by Microsoft affected Gartner’s forecast.

Indeed, the PC market seems to be on a rapid and worrying decline. Worldwide desktop and notebook shipments are expected to drop by 11.2 percent this year compared to 2012. Adding ultramobiles to the group only reduces the decline to 8.4 percent. The latest Bay Trail and Haswell processors might not do much to curb the trend as consumers reach out for smaller and more affordable tablets even while keeping an eye out for interesting new ultramobile devices.

SOURCE: Gartner