Acer on the rise in notebook rankings
The latest batch of market share numbers from iSuppli shows that while Hewlett-Packard continues to dominate the notebook PC market, Acer is coming on strong.
Acer moved up into third place during the last quarter, moving past Toshiba, in iSuppli's most recent look at worldwide notebook shipments. HP's on top with 21.4 percent of the notebook market, and actually grew faster than Acer as compared to last year. But Acer had a really strong showing in the fourth quarter as compared to the third, enough to put it extremely close to second-place Dell. Dell has 14.9 percent, while Acer has 14.3 percent.
Dell and Toshiba were the losers on the list, each dropping a little over a point of market share in the fourth quarter. Both companies found it hard to compete with Acer's pricing and HP's strength in the market, iSuppli said in its report. Lenovo was fifth in the rankings with 7.9 percent of the market, compared to Toshiba's 10.4 percent.
Notebook PCs continue to be the sunny spot in the PC world, with growth of 28 percent in 2006. iSuppli expects notebook sellers to post similar numbers this year.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
