Touchscreen notebooks are taking over. New statistics from IHS-owned Displaybank market research says that shipments of touchscreen notebooks during Q1 2013 were up by 51.8 per cent compared to Q4 2012.
During Q1 2013 around 10 per cent of all notebooks shipped were touchscreen models. The figures for Q1 show that 46 million notebook computers were shipped and 4.57 million of them were touchscreen enabled. Research firm Displaybank are apparently impressed with the take off in sales of such notebooks; “Considering that the market is at its initial stage, Displaybank believes the penetration rate of touch screen notebooks is quite high,” reported DigiTimes.
Ten per cent isn’t a lot considering the touch-centric Windows 8 OS is being shipped as default on most PCs now. However with Windows 8.1 on the way, and available as a free update, people who don’t fancy touching their PC screens will be able to more easily ignore the Modern UI side of the OS and boot straight to the desktop and use the Start Screen only as a glorified Start Menu.
DigiTimes also suggests that many PC makers have much higher targets than just 10 per cent. The Taiwanese tech journal suggests that brands such as Lenovo, Acer and Asus have targets for touchscreen enabled notebook shipments of over 20 per cent, a doubling of the status quo. Lenovo have a pretty good track record for doing the right thing in the current “challenging” PC market so it is probably the smart to do - until cheap and good quality motion controllers become available and are used to control the Windows 8 MUI and apps.
