While it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise given the fairly steady growth netbooks have seen since their inception as a product category, it's still pretty notable that they've apparently now managed to nearly double traditional laptops in sales growth during the second quarter of this year. That word comes from market research firm DisplaySearch, which found that netbook shipments grew an impressive 40% compared to the same quarter last year, as opposed to 22% for plain old laptops. As excitingly illustrated in the chart above, however, that still leaves netbooks (or "mini-notes") well behind laptops in terms of total shipments, although that seems almost certain to narrow considerably in the months and years ahead -- at least until the line between netbooks and laptops becomes so blurred that we just start calling everything "laptops" again.

While any number of total netbooks shipped or sold is bound to be a little suspect, given that many folks can't even agree on what a netbook is, this latest report from research firm DisplayBank at least gives us a decent impression, and confirms what many likely thought. According to the report, the total netbook shipments for 2008 reached an impressive 14.6 million, with Acer and ASUS leading the way with a 37.3% and 33.2% market share, respectively, and HP a distant third with 7.5%. Those numbers, however, represent just 11% of total laptop sales, although DisplayBank sees that share increasing to 18.9% by 2012. As you might have guessed, to arrive at the number, the folks from DisplayBank also offered up their own definition of a netbook, which they describe as "as having similar functions as NotePC, supports networking and have retail price lower than US$650. Especially, products are narrowed with screen size of 7 - 10.2 inch and with Linux or Microsoft Windows operating system equipped." Yeah, that'll settle things.

[Via China Times]

We've seen plenty of evidence of netbooks' impact on computer round here (like the image above), and market research firm IDC has now found that the situation is much the same in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (otherwise known to market research-types as EMEA), and it has some numbers to back it up. According to the firm, it estimates that there were more than two million netbooks sold in the EMEA market during the third quarter of 2008, which is a hefty chunk (more than 7%) of the 27.9 million laptops and desktops sold during the same time period. Of those, IDC found that ASUS and Acer had corned a hefty 80% of the market, with broadband-equipped netbooks offered by cellphone carriers also helping to boost those two companies in particular. Not surprisingly, it only sees things going up from here, and it estimates that sales could potentially double to a full four million in the fourth quarter of this year.

[Via Register Hardware]