HP has had some tough times in the past year – after their then-CEO Leo Apotheker announced that HP would be stepping out of the PC game, their sales figures took a small dive, but luckily he got ousted before such rash moves. HP is now once again back in the number one spot when it comes to overall PC sales worldwide.

Canalis’s research now starts to include tablet devices under PC sales, and Apple’s iPad sales has contributed significantly to Apple’s sales numbers, but even so, HP’s sales was slightly higher overall. So Apple was in second place, Lenovo in third (with big increases in sales) and Acer and Dell taking the fourth and fifth spots.

What is clear however, is that tablet devices has started to eat away at the previously very popular netbook market:

“The total client PC market grew by 21% to 107 million units. Importantly, while the pad category exhibited the highest growth – more than 200% year on year – notebook and desktop PC shipments were up too, rising 11% and 8% respectively. Netbook shipments, however, were down 34% on the year-ago quarter – the sixth such fall in succession.”

It seems like buyers are moving away from poorly built cheap hardware, and would rather purchase tablet devices that give a much better user experience and better designed hardware.

“If you look at the US, pads are approaching 40% of all client PC shipments” said Canalys VP and Principal Analyst, Chris Jones.

These massive sales figures in the tablet category must be making HP nervous, seeing as they decided to drop their WebOS based tablet, only weeks after being launched. Other top manufacturers all have tablet devices, but HP has decided to rather throw their weight behind upcoming Windows 8 tablets.

Source: Canalys