The electronics market research firm, iSuppli, noted that, for the first time ever during the third quarter, the shipping of laptops outpaced the shipping of desktops worldwide, most likely due to the strong sales of netbooks. Overall, the third quarter sales of 38.6 million units marked a 40 percent increase from the same period last year.

Meanwhile, the shipping of 38.5 million units of desktops indicated a 1.3 percent drop from the same quarter last year. The shipping of 79 million units of PCs indicated a
15.4 percent rise over the same period in 2007.

According to Matthew Wilkins, iSuppli's principal analyst for compute platforms, "Momentum has been building in the notebook market for some time, so it's not a complete surprise that shipments have surpassed those of desktops."

The market share of leading PC suppliers went in the following order: HP led the others with 18.8 percent share by shipping 14.9; followed by Dell with almost 11 million units; Acer with 9.8 million units; Lenovo with 7.5 percent market share; and Toshiba with 4.6 percent of the market.

In a statement, Wilkins said the big news was the performance of Taiwan's Acer, which shipped nearly 3 million more notebooks, primarily the netbook products, from the figures of the preceding quarter.

In fact, with the surge in netbooks, Acer appears to be all set to become the world's second-largest PC supplier behind HP, surpassing Dell - Acer trails Dell by less than 2 percentage points of market share for all PCs.