Ultramobile Devices Seen as Upgrade Option for Consumers Upgrading Notebooks and Premium Tablets

Combined worldwide shipments of PCs, tablets and smartphones are projected to reach 2.35 billion units this year, up 5.9 percent from 2012, according to Gartner. The market is being driven by sales in tablets, smartphones and ultramobile PCs, while desktop and notebook PC shipments are forecast to drop 10.6 percent from 341 million units last year to 305 million in 2013 and 289 million units in 2014, it said. A sharp decline in Q1 PC sales was due to a change in consumer preferences and to an adjustment in the sales channel to make room for new products hitting the market in the second half of 2013, Gartner said.

Shipments of ultramobiles -- which Gartner defines as Chromebooks, thin and light clamshell PC designs, and slate and hybrid devices running Windows 8 -- are expected to grow from 9.7 million last year to 20.3 million in 2013 and 39.8 million in 2014, Gartner said. Demand for ultramobiles will come from consumers looking to upgrade notebooks and premium tablets, according to Gartner analysts, who said ultramobile devices are pulling demand away from other devices. That trend will be more evident in Q4 when new designs based on Intel’s Bay Trail and Haswell processors running on Windows 8.1 hit the market, they said. The new ultramobiles will help overall PC sales volumes marginally early on but are expected to help vendors boost average selling prices and margins going forward, Gartner said.

Meanwhile, tablets are on a path to jump 67.9 percent this year to 202 million units shipped and to 276 million units in 2014, Gartner said. The increase in lower priced tablets and the value shift from hardware to software will lead to extended lifetimes for premium tablets as they “remain active in the household for longer,” said Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner. Consumer preferences will divide between basic tablets and ultramobile devices, he said. In smartphones, volume expectations for 2013 have been pared back as consumers wait for new models and lower prices to hit the market in the second half. As smartphone penetration moves more to the mass market, price points are dropping along with margins, he said.

By operating system, the Android ecosystem is forecast to account for more than one billion device shipments in 2014, compared with 378 million units for Windows and 355 million units for iOS devices, said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner. But ecosystem owners are “challenged in having the same relevance in all segments,” Milanesi said. Apple holds court as the “more homogeneous presence across all device segments,” while 90 percent of Android sales are in smartphones and 85 percent of Microsoft sales are PC-based, she said.

Consumer appeal will continue to be important not only at retail but in the enterprise as well, Milanesi said. “With enterprises’ growing acceptance of ‘bring your own device’ models to the workplace, there’s an increase in consumer-owned devices in the computing world,” she said. Consumer-bought computing devices are forecast to rise from 65 percent in 2013 to 72 percent in 2017, signifying “the growing importance of designing for the consumer inside the enterprise,” she said.