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Mobility drives device market

In 2014, there will be nearly as many tablets shipped as PCs.
Written by Tyler Falk, Contributor

The ability to connect anytime, anywhere is continuing to power the market for 2.35 billion devices -- PCs, tablets, and mobile phones -- that are estimated to be shipped this year.

The estimates come from a new Gartner report which says that shipments of traditional PCs will continue to fall, down 10 percent this year, while tablets will rise nearly 68 percent.

Here's a comparison between numbers in 2012 and new estimates for 2013 and 2014:

Tablets are growing at such a pace that they will nearly catch up to PCs by 2014. At the same time, ultramobile devices, like Google's Chromebook, are seeing strong growth, though total volume is still low.

“Consumers want anytime-anywhere computing that allows them to consume and create content with ease, but also share and access that content from a different portfolio of products. Mobility is paramount in both mature and emerging markets,” said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner.

Also included in this latest Gartner analysis, is the operating system used on these devices. While the three most popular operating systems will all see growth between 2012 and 2014, Android will remain the top OS over Windows and Apple's iOS by a significant margin thanks to its dominating share of the smartphone market.

Photo: Flickr/romainguy

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com

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