Hasta La Gadget!

How do you close out a console generation? By reclaiming your crown. According to NPD’s October figures, Microsoft is back on top: The Xbox 360 is once again the best-selling home console. It’s hardly surprising — Microsoft has dominated home console sales for years, losing out to the PlayStation 3 for the first time in ages just last month. It almost wouldn’t be notable, save for the fact that this month’s numbers are the last NPD figures before the industry moves on. The PlayStation 4 launches at midnight tonight, and the Xbox One will be available in just a few days. You can almost see the anticipation in the numbers. Hardware sales totaled $171.7 million for the month, 8 percent less than the same period last year and over $10 million less than the previous month. Business as usual, really. Care to take stab at who will take the cake in generation eight’s first NPD report? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Filed under: Gaming, HD, Sony, Microsoft

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Source: Joystiq

Snapped up a Chromebook for less than three Benjamins? If so, NPD thinks you’ve made Page and Co.’s devices account for 20 and 25 percent of laptops sold for under $300. Stephen Baker, an NPD analyst, told Bloomberg that the research firm was initially skeptical about the cloud-tied laptops, but Google’s hardware “found a niche in the marketplace.” Mountain View’s mobile PC foray took eight months to reach current sales numbers and NPD claims that based on price, they’re the fastest-growing part of the PC industry. Bloomberg attributes the recent uptick in sales to the education market and early adopters — increased retail availability probably doesn’t hurt, either.

Filed under: Laptops, Google

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Via: The Register (UK)

Source: Bloomberg

Nothing super-shocking in this latest report from NPD — not after seeing fairly similar numbers from Strategy Analytics not all that long ago, that is. According to the research group, Apple’s leading the pack at 39-percent of US smartphone sales in the final quarter of last year — that number’s down from 41-percent this time last year. Bigger changes are afoot over at Samsung, however. The handset maker jumped from 21- to 30-percent from the same time last year, thanks in no small part to demand for the Galaxy S III. Go figure, NPD’s top five list is dominated entirely by iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S iterations — in fact, combined, the two manufacturers make up some 70-percent of sales. Motorola is in at a distant third, with seven-percent of sales, followed by HTC and LG, each at six-percent.

Filed under: Mobile, Apple, Samsung

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Every year that passes, we hear of tablet sales getting closer and closer to computer sales as analysts have been speculating for some time now one day, the world will go tablet-crazy and prefer them to computers. Before you take that bit of info to heart and decide to proclaim your love for your computer, you may want to hear what the NPD has to report today.

According to NPD, this year seems to be on track to be the year where tablet shipments will overtake notebooks. In total, NPD is estimating tablet shipments to reach over 240 million units worldwide while notebooks are projected to reach 207 million shipments this year.

A few weeks ago, we published a report by analytics firm Flurry that saw Christmas Day 2012 being a record-breaking day for Tablet and Smartphone activations with a 332 percent increase compared to the average amount of activations between December 1 and December 20. Judging by that report, it looks as though today’s news may not be so far fetched.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Microsoft Sells 60M Windows 8 Licenses, OLPC XO-4 Arriving This March,

Microsoft earlier this week made a point of noting that there have been 40 million downloads of Windows 8 since it launched a month ago, putting it ahead of where Windows 7 was at the same point in its sales cycle. But according to figures out today from NPD, in the midst of an overall slowdown in PC sales, this is not translating into robust hardware sales in the influential U.S. market.

U.S. sales of Windows devices in the last month are down by 21% compared to the same period a year ago, with Windows-powered notebooks — generally in decline since the rise of tablets and smartphones — down by 24%. Desktop devices were down, too, but less, at 9%.

It gets worse. Microsoft has make a big bet on the touchscreen and tablets with Windows 8, but so far, NPD’s Stephen Baker says that Windows 8 tablet sales “have been almost non-existent.” Unit sales, he says, have been less than 1% of all Windows 8 device sales to date. The caveat is that NPD’s numbers do not include sales of Microsot’s own tablet, the Surface. (We are contacting Baker at NPD to see if he can give more detail on how those are selling and why they have been left out.)

So do these numbers indicate that — despite the record-breaking sales we’ve seen so far for online shopping this holiday season, which often gives an annual boost to the consumer electronics industry — Microsoft has a turkey on its hands in the form of Windows 8? Not exactly, says NPD. The problems could be just as attributable to a sluggish market at this point.

“After just four weeks on the market, it’s still early to place blame on Windows 8 for the ongoing weakness in the PC market,” writes Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD. “We still have the whole holiday selling season ahead of us, but clearly Windows 8 did not prove to be the impetus for a sales turnaround some had hoped for.”

There are still devices being sold with earlier versions of Windows, and NPD says that since launch Windows 8 hasn’t been performing as well against legacy equipment, compared to the same period in the Windows 7 sales cycle. It says 58% of Windows devices sold are loaded with Windows 8, versu 83% powered by Windows 7 one month after its launch.

“The bad Back-to-School period left a lot of inventory in the channel,” Baker explains.

Silver lining: hybrid devices — notebooks with touchscreens, such as the Asus Transformer, pictured — seemed to be doing alright. Yes, they accounted for just 6% of notebook sales, but with an average price of $867 (compared to $433 across all Windows devices) they show that there is at least some appetite for premium products, an area where Windows OEMs traditionally compete against Apple.