A new research report shows that PC sales are now declining while the sales figures of tablets and smartphones are rising. This new trend shows that people are now more interested in tablets and smartphones as compared to PCs.

In the research report done by Gartner, the research showed that PC shipments (excluding tablet computers) only had a total of 87.5 million units by the second quarter of 2012. Mikako Kitagawa, a research analsyt from Garnter described this situation stating "In the second quarter of 2012, the PC market suffered through its seventh consecutive quarter of flat to single-digit growth". Even the emergence of "ultrabooks" which are high-powered PCs were not able to have a great impact on the rise of PCs. In fact, the sector for ultrabooks was small and only had a small impact on overall sales.

The top PC sellers were also identified in the research and the top companies are:

  1. Hewlett-Packard - 14.9% market share
  2. Lenovo - 14.7& market share
  3. Acer Group - 11% market share
  4. Dell - 10.7 % market share

Kitagawa also mentioned the possible reason for this. Here is the explanation that Katigawa provided:

"Consumers are less interested in spending time on PCs as there are other technology products and services, such as the latest smartphones and media tablets that they are purchasing. This is more of a trend in the mature market as PCs are highly saturated in these markets."

On the other hand, a different research report shows that the tablet market is seeing a rising trend and people are already considering tablets as "essential" for their personal and business needs. This research done by ABI Research shows that tablets are expected to overtake notebooks PCs by the year 2016.